the strongest and indeed only efficient support against the still recurring temptation of adopting, nay, wishing the truth of Spinoza's notion, that the survival of consciousness is the highest prize and consequence of the highest virtue, and that of all below this mark the lot after death is self-oblivion and the cessation of individual being.

Survival is an outliving, or outlasting of something else.

What may be meant by this idea of 'fitness'which meets us in the famous phrase that the 'survival of the fittest' in the struggle for life is the goal of evolutionis a question which brings us at once to the consideration of the ethical significance of the theory.