ABSTRACT
This chapter's first suggestion that Darwin's theory promises progress is in the subtitle of The Origin of Species —or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life —and in Darwin's later use of that catchy but unfortunate phrase 'survival of the fittest'. This phrase he appears to have borrowed from Herbert Spencer, an author for whose philosophical works Darwin in his own later years expressed vast respect. The chapter discusses traditional contrasts between higher and lower animals, combined with the more recent recognition that the former are all among the later products of the evolutionary process, may raise hopes of finding in living nature a passable substitute for Matthew Arnold's God: 'something, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness'. It explores most fundamental reason why no guarantee can be found either in Darwinism or in any other theory of subhuman evolution and discusses the relations and lack of relations between the conceptual frameworks of Malthus and of Darwin.
