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.