judged in the light of its result. This paper was part of a _Symposium_.
Mr. S. Alexander has argued in a previous paper against the hypothesis
of 'design' in Nature on the ground that 'the fair order of Nature is
only acquired by a wholesale waste and sacrifice.' This argument was
developed by pointing to the obvious 'mal-adjustments,' 'aimless
destructions,' &c., which characterize the processes of Nature. But
these, Romanes replies, necessarily belong to the process considered as
one of 'natural selection.' The question is only: Is such a process _per
se_ incompatible with the hypothesis of design? And he replies in the
negative.


'"The fair order of Nature is only acquired by a wholesale waste and
sacrifice." Granted. But if the "wholesale waste and sacrifice," as
antecedent, leads to a "fair order of Nature" as its consequent, how can
it be said that the "wholesale waste and sacrifice" has been a failure?
Or how can it be said that, in point of fact, there _has_ been a waste,
or _has_ been a sacrifice? Clearly such things can only be said when
our point of view is restricted to the means (i.e. the wholesale
destruction of the less fit); not when we extend our view to what, even
within the limits of human observation, is unquestionably the _end_
(i.e. the causal result in an ever improving world of types). A
candidate who is plucked in a Civil Service examination because he
happens to be one of the less fitted to pass, is no doubt an instance of
failure so far as his own career is concerned; but it does not therefore
follow that the system of examination is a failure in its final end of
securing the best men for the Civil Service. And the fact that the
general outcome of all the individual failures in Nature is that of
securing what Mr. Alexander calls "the fair order of Nature," is
assuredly evidence that the _modus operandi_ has not been a failure in