Struggle for existence

“ It is the struggle for existence, the “battle of life,” which exercises the moral faculties and calls forth the latent sparks of genius. The hope of gain, the love of power, the desire of fame and approbation, excite to noble deeds, and call into action all those faculties which are the distinctive attributes of man. ”

“ In the case of mankind, the self-assertion, the unscrupulous seizing upon all that can be grasped, the tenacious holding of all that can be kept, which constitute the essence of the struggle for existence, have answered. ”

“ It is difficult to explain these survivals when we pretend to be so much shocked by the struggle for existence. We must accept the struggle, but we ought to try to understand it. The actual suffering among the creatures as the result of this struggle is probably small, and the bloody and ferocious contest that we like to picture to ourselves is relatively insignificant. There is a righteous element in the struggle; or, more truthfully, the struggle itself is right. Every living and sentient thing persists by its merit and by its right. ”

“ Thru all the ages past men, civilized men, so-called, have been at each other's throats in the struggle for existence, and the spirit of individualism this struggle has begotten, the spirit of hard, sordid, brutal selfishness, has filled this world with unutterable anguish and woe. ”

“ As a matter of fact, we usually find these impulses to a new life drawn into the service of natural and social self-preservation, and, over against the passionate struggle for existence, condemned to complete impotence and shadowiness. ”

“ I maintained, and I still maintain, that the struggle for existence is a law inseparable from life, and consequently from humanity itself, but that, though remaining an inherent and constant law, it is gradually transformed in its essence and attenuated in its forms.
Among primitive mankind the struggle for existence is but slightly differentiated from that which obtains among the other animals. ”

“ But don't you think that if everybody, including the best people, thinkers and men of science, were to take part in the struggle for existence, each man for himself, and took to breaking stones and painting roofs, it would be a serious menace to progress? ”

“ If the opinion comes to prevail in a society that the struggle for existence justifies or demands a reckless pursuit of one's own interests, the oppression and ruin of the weak by the strong, the destruction of misery by destroying the miserable, the extirpation of the voice of compassion, which protests within us against such a course ”

“ IN all places of the civilized world, and in all classes of the civilized community, the struggle for existence is now more keen than ever it has been during the history of our race. Everywhere men, and women, and children are living at a pressure positively frightful to contemplate. ”

“ Anti-Darwin.—As to the famous "struggle for existence," it seems to me, for the present, to be more of an assumption than a fact. It does occur, but as an exception. The general condition of life! is not one of want or famine, but rather of riches, of lavish luxuriance, and even of absurd prodigality,—where there is a struggle, it is a struggle for power. ”

“ The struggle for happiness has brought forth, out of the privileges and endeavors of individuals, civilization in its present form. Want and the necessity for labor have been the spur to endeavor and advance. Through the concepts of ends and of intention, the self-conscious will further evolved ideas, which themselves undergo a struggle in the activities to which they give [Pg 171] rise; and this is no longer the struggle for existence, but the struggle for civilization. ”

“ When what is called the struggle for existence has been proved to lead, not to the deterioration but to the improvement of life—to the greatest abundance of the highest kinds of life possible in the circumstances—it will have been vindicated and shown to have been a means to secure such ends as a wise and benevolent Being would entertain. ”

“ Prevalent peoples at the close of the nineteenth century believed that they prevailed by virtue of the Struggle for Existence, in which the strong and cunning{v2-423} get the better of the weak and confiding. ”

“ We are really for brief moments Primordial Being itself, and feel its indomitable desire for being and joy in existence; the struggle, the pain, the destruction of phenomena, now appear to us as something necessary, considering the surplus of innumerable forms of existence which throng and push one another into life, considering the exuberant fertility of the universal will. ”

“ To the struggle for bare existence, which never ends, though it may be alleviated and partially disguised for a fortunate few, succeeded the struggle to make existence intelligible and to bring the order of things into harmony with the moral sense of man, which also never ends, but, for the thinking few, becomes keener with every increase of knowledge and with every step towards the realization of a worthy ideal of life. ”

“ And, by implication, the uniform principle has been that the ill-adapted, disadvantaged in the struggle for existence, shall bear the consequent evils: either disappearing when its imperfections are extreme, or else rearing fewer offspring, which, inheriting its imperfections, tend to dwindle away in posterity. ”

“ And Man saw that all is passing in this mad, monstrous world, that all is struggling to snatch, at any cost, a few brief moments of life before Death's inexorable decree. And Man said: 'There is a hidden purpose, could we but fathom it, and the purpose is good; for we must reverence something, and in the visible world there is nothing worthy of reverence.' And Man stood aside from the struggle, resolving that God intended harmony to come out of chaos by human efforts. ”

“ How constantly do I read this in the countenances of those I meet in the world!—They do not know themselves why there should be this perpetual uneasiness, this jarring and discord within; but it is the vain struggle of the soul, which God created in his own image, to fit its strong, immortal nature for the society which men have framed after their own devices. ”

“ These words but reflect the thoughts of thousands, who, wearily struggling along the path of life, ask themselves wonderingly, “Why existence, if this is all it brings?” Many a tired and saddened soul has lain itself down to die, with the undefined feeling that the wasted life left behind might not have been if only—only—ay, if only what? ”

“ If the notion of a life of grace, peace, and freedom are just fictions invited to escape our universal shallowness, then why proceed at all? If there is no abiding, transcendent reality to which man may turn, then why should we carry on our existence? ”

“ Suffering, struggle, work, and death are raised as objections against life, they make life questionable, unnatural—something that must cease, and for which one not only requires but also has—remedies! ”

“ There amidst the world new-builded shall our earthly deeds abide,
Though our names be all forgotten, and the tale of how we died.
Life or death then, who shall heed it, what we gain or what we lose?
Fair flies life amid the struggle, and the Cause for each shall choose.
Hear a word, a word in season, for the day is drawing nigh,
When the Cause shall call upon us, some to live, and some to die! ”

“ But there are moments when one has to choose between living one’s own life, fully, entirely, completely—or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands. ”

“ Is it, in truth, anything other than that contrast of every day, that struggle of every moment, between two opposing principles which are ever face to face in life, and which dispute possession of man from the cradle to the tomb? ”

“ In the nebulous haze of our dissolution will survive the essence of all that has ever been in human life,—the units of every existence that was or is, with all their affinities, all their tendencies, all their inheritance of forces making for good or evil, all the powers amassed through myriad generations, all energies that ever shaped the strength of races;—and times innumerable will these again be orbed into life and thought. ”

“ If we really could know what we were fighting for, if we if we could deeply believe in what we were fighting for, then the struggle might have dignity, beauty, satisfaction for us. If it were a profound struggle for something that was coming to life in us, a struggle that we were convinced would bring us to a new freedom, a new life, then it would be a creative activity, a creative activity in which death is a climax in the progression towards new being. And this is tragedy. ”

“ Having been hurled into an existence gigantic, monstrous, in which there were no limits to either the devotion or the cruelty of human beings toward one another, all other ways of living had grown pale and small. ”

“ We must see further than finite forms to gain the true sense of existence. And where shall we look to rest the gaze in the unsearchable realm of Mind? Let us look where we would walk, act as we would act in the possession of all power to create our own destiny. ”

“ The rise, the long, slow upward struggle of the soul of man was as destined and inevitable as its fall; all human achievement, material or spiritual, was founded in the baseness of mire and clay—and rose towering above its foundations. ”

“ But there can be no doubt as to the end. A struggle has been forced upon us by a doomed people, if the laws of nature do not fail, if there is any meaning in the moral sentiments of mankind, or any justice in heaven. ”

“ And if it shall come then, you shall await it with fortitude, knowing that this life is but a single link in the chain of existence which stretches through infinity; and that, if you shall be found worthy, you shall be taught how a chosen few among your sons and daughters shall survive the ruin of the world, to be the parents of the new race, and replenish the earth and possess it. ”

“ In the real world there can be but one life and one death, and we individuals, whatever our century, divide the labour of them both. Even our present life and consciousness and our will must be said to belong, in return, to those who have gone before ”

“ And yet, if his misdeeds have helped to make manifest that all effort to reclaim his kind must begin with the conditions of life against which his very existence is a protest, even the tough has not lived in vain. ”

“ Is not this point of view, however briefly and crudely expressed, the first principle of existence as it confronts each individual to-day, as it has confronted them in the past, and as it will continue to confront them always? ”

“ Yet our general knowledge of poor, rarely balanced human nature and our detailed historical experience respectively anticipate and demonstrate how easy it is, on this point also, to confound the means with the end, and a part with the whole. And by such confusion either self-renunciation, that very salt of all truly human existence, gets actually stapled up in one corner of the wide world and of multiform life ”

“ And so, no matter how much we may conceal the fact from ourselves, we cannot help but see that the meaning of our life can be neither in our personal, carnal existence, which is subject to inevitable sufferings and inevitable death, nor in any worldly institution or structure. ”

“ And, finally, let us ask again—what is this act of antagonism against the natural states of humanity?—what is this act in which we sacrifice our sensations, passions, and desires, that is, our false selves, upon the shrine of our true selves?—what is this act in which Freedom and Will are embodied to defeat all the enslaving powers of darkness that are incessantly beleaguering us?—what is it but morality of the highest, noblest, and most active kind? and, therefore, what is human philosophy, ultimately, but another name for human virtue of the most practical and exalted character? ”

“ To define them as an ever-recurring struggle for Freedom against every form of Might. A struggle resultant from an innate yearning for self-expression, and the recognition of one's own possibilities and their attitude toward other human beings. ”

“ Starting with this the years must bring more light, and the conservation of a love of life and at the same time of power will keep one in a state to take advantage of any new light on this terrible problem of existence, of how to get through life in the best way, for in the final analysis that is what all philosophy teaches. ”

“ The causes of such minds are many: heredity, environment, associations, lack of proper self-control and understanding; they can all be summed up, however, as the lack of moral sense in the individual and in the race. The guiding star of existence, the conscience, in such cases, has ceased to function; the goal ahead, a future existence, has been lost sight of. Souls are adrift. Here is the secret of the unrest, the crime, the upheaval of to-day.
The old forms of religion, with their rituals and professions, have lost their hold upon a large [Pg 328] portion of humanity. ”

“ According to our view the real and important variations in the multiform spectacle of the universe are the variations brought about by the perpetual struggle between life and death, in other words between the personal energy of creation and the personal resistance of malice. ”