highly endowed with it; and this can only happen when the attribute
is one of greater importance, for the time being, than most of the
other attributes.

If those members of the species which have but ordinary shares of
it, nevertheless survive by virtue of other superiorities which they
severally possess, then it is not easy to see how this particular
attribute can be developed by natural selection in subsequent
generations." (For if some other superiority is a greater source of
luck, then natural selection, or survival of the luckiest, will
ensure that this other superiority be preserved at the expense of
the one acquired in the earlier generation.) "The probability seems
rather to be, that by gamogenesis, this extra endowment will, on the
average, be diminished in posterity--just serving in the long run to
compensate the deficient endowments of other individuals, whose
special powers lie in other directions; and so to keep up the normal
structure of the species. The working out of the process is here
somewhat difficult to follow" (there is no difficulty as soon as it
is perceived that Mr. Darwin's natural selection invariably means,
or ought to mean, the survival of the luckiest, and that seasons and
what they bring with them, though fairly constant on an average, yet
individually vary so greatly that what is luck in one season is
disaster in another); "but it appears to me that as fast as the
number of bodily and mental faculties increases, and as fast as the
maintenance of life comes to depend less on the amount of any one,
and more on the combined action of all, so fast does the production
of specialities of character by natural selection alone become
difficult. Particularly does this seem to be so with a species so
multitudinous in powers as mankind; and above all does it seem to be
so with such of the human powers as have but minor shares in aiding