Competition is a necessary condition of progressive life. I do not know
if so far I have made that belief sufficiently clear in these
confessions. Perhaps in my anxiety to convey my idea of a human
synthesis I have not sufficiently insisted upon the part played by
competition in that synthesis. But the implications of the view that I
have set forth are fairly plain. Every individual, I have stated, is an
experiment for the synthesis of the species, and upon that idea my
system of conduct so far as it is a system is built. Manifestly the
individual's function is either self-development, service and
reproduction, or failure and an end.
With moral and intellectual development the desire to serve and
participate in a collective purpose arises to control the blind and
passionate impulse to survival and reproduction that the struggle for
life has given us, but it does not abolish the fact of selection, of
competition. I contemplate no end of competition. But for competition
that is passionate, egoistic and limitless, cruel, clumsy and wasteful,
I desire to see competition that is controlled and fair-minded and
devoted, men and women doing their utmost with themselves and making
their utmost contribution to the specific accumulation, but in the end
content to abide by a verdict.
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