Some may wonder that a student of science should come to this conclusion. There is a vague idea abroad that an individualist struggle for existence and survival of the fittest is the supreme and unalterable law of life. This idea, though encouraged by men like Mr. Kidd, is due to a merely superficial acquaintance with biology. In past ages nature has certainly evolved higher types mainly by a bloody struggle of individuals or a very calamitous pressure of environment. _In the past_: there is the limit of the teaching of biology. A new thing--human intelligence--has now entered the life of the earth, and it has in countless ways superseded the laws (that is to say, practices) of unconscious nature. The human mind is now a part of nature, and therefore "natural selection" is a wholly different matter from what it once was. Maurice Maeterlinck has suggested this with his usual felicity. He imagines himself on a hill, from which he sees two watercourses stretching toward the sea. One meanders over the plains, wasting time and space, blindly finding its way over the uneven ground: that is the old, unintelligent method of nature. The other waterway stretches straight across the landscape, a canal cut by man in the course of a few years, with no waste of ground: it is the new, intelligent method of nature. By this method we now create new species of plants in a thousandfold less time than natural selection (in the usual sense) could do; and we do it precisely by dispensing with the individualist struggle, by intelligent arrangement and control.
Early science set up unintelligent nature as a grand model for man. It is time we outgrew this phase of infancy. Intelligence must increasingly count in the life of the earth. We first organise a nation, and presently we shall organise international life. We organise particular businesses, and presently we shall organise the whole industrial life of the planet. There is no part of human life which calls more urgently for the application of intelligence than this disordered, wasteful, pitiless, poverty-saturated industrial world of ours. Let us treat human beings at least as intelligently as we treat our flowers, and as humanely as we treat our horses. We do not entrust those to the tragedy of struggle and survival. We need not fear that there will be any restriction of the development of personality. Under such a Collectivist system as I have in mind, personality will be developed until every man and woman is conscious of his or her share in the control of the destinies of this planet, and the sheep-like respect for ancient traditions and abuses, which impedes our progress to-day, will be for ever abolished.