While he himself was chiefly using the term in its narrow
sense for his own special purpose, he warned his followers against
committing the error (which he seems once to have committed
himself) of overrating its narrow meaning. In The Descent
of Man he gave some powerful pages to illustrate its proper,
wide sense. He pointed out how, in numberless animal societies,
the struggle between separate individuals for the means of
existence disappears, how struggle is replaced by co-operation,
and how that substitution results in the development of in-
tellectual and moral faculties which secure to the species the best
conditions for survival. He intimated that in such cases the
fittest are not the physically strongest, nor the cunningest, but
those who learn to combine so as mutually to support each other,
strong and weak alike, for the welfare of the community. "Those
communities," he wrote, "which included the greatest number
of the most sympathetic members would flourish best, and rear
the greatest number of offspring" ( 2nd edit., p. 163). The term,
which originated from the narrow Malthusian conception of
competition between each and all, thus lost its narrowness in
the mind of one who knew Nature.

Unhappily, these remarks, which might have become the basis
of most fruitful researches, were overshadowed by the masses
of facts gathered for the purpose of illustrating the consequences
of a real competition for life. Besides, Darwin never attempted
to submit to a closer investigation the relative importance of the
two aspects under which the struggle for existence appears in
the animal world, and he never wrote the work he proposed to
write upon the natural checks to over-multiplication, although
that work would have been the crucial test for appreciating the
real purport of individual struggle. Nay, on the very pages
just mentioned, amidst data disproving the narrow Malthusian
conception of struggle, the old Malthusian leaven reappeared--
namely, in Darwin's remarks as to the alleged inconveniences of
maintaining the "weak in mind and body" in our civilized
societies (ch. v). As if thousands of weak-bodied and infirm
poets, scientists, inventors, and reformers, together with other
thousands of so-called "fools" and "weak-minded enthusiasts,"
were not the most precious weapons used by humanity in its
struggle for existence by intellectual and moral arms, which
Darwin himself emphasized in those same chapters of Descent
of Man.

It happened with Darwin's theory as it always happens with

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