204 HERBERT SPENCER

Selection.—As we have seen, Spencer incorporated
into his scheme the Darwinian concept of Selection,
and sought to show that it could be included under
the general concept of Evolution as "a continuous
redistribution of matter and motion." " That natural
selection is, and always has been, operative is incon-
testable. . . . The survival of the fittest is a necessity,
its negation is incontestable."

That he did not take a narrow view of the process
of Selection, which has so many forms and operates at
so many levels, will be admitted j and we may illustrate
this by showing that he had a prevision of what Roux
called "mtra-individual selection" or "intra-selection."

In his essay on "The Social Organism" (1860), he
wrote :—

" The different parts of a social organism, like the different
parts of an individual organism, compete for nutriment; and
severally obtain more or less of it according as they are
discharging more or less duty." (See also Essays, i. 290.)
And, again, in 1876, in his Principles of Sociology, he
amplified his statement thus: " All other organs, therefore,
jointly and individually, compete for blood with each organ,
. . . local tissue formation (which under normal conditions
measures the waste of tissue in discharging function) is itself
a cause of increased supply of materials . . . the resulting
competition, not between units simply, but between organs,
causes in a society, as in a living body, high nutrition and
growth of parts called into the greatest activity by the
requirements of the rest." And once more: " For clearly,
if the survival of the fittest among organisms is a process of
equilibration between actions in the environment and actions
in the organism ; so must the local modifications of their
parts, external and internal, be regarded as survivals of
structures, the reactions of which are in equilibrium with the
actions they are subject to." Clearly Spencer had a prevision
of what Roux calls "Der Kanlpf der Theile im Organismus" .
(The struggle of parts within the organism), and we havee of a complex form of the universal redistri-