適者生存 tekisha seizon Survival of the Fittest
This is a philological study of the Japanese phrase 適者生存 (tekisha seizon), survival of the fittest. It spans the record from Herbert Spencer's coinage of 1864 to the phrase's arrival in Chinese by 1902, and examines why the phrase commonly called Darwin's is Spencer's, and why the Japanese word itself is 1883, not 1881, and not the superlative form the two Meiji translations of the Origin preferred.
Abstract
適者生存, tekisha seizon, is the Japanese word for survival of the fittest. The English phrase is commonly called Darwin's; it is Herbert Spencer's, coined in 1864 and adopted by Darwin in 1869 as more accurate than his own natural selection. The Japanese word went through three forms before settling: the fit species in 1881, the fit one in 1883, and a superlative rival, the fittest, from 1891 that the language did not keep. It reached Chinese by 1902.
Overview
The sense. 適者 is the one that fits: 適 means suited to, and nothing in it means strong. 生存 is to stay alive. Together, in the dictionary's words, in the struggle for existence, only what is best suited to its surroundings survives and leaves descendants [1].
The words. Every word in the phrase's family is Meiji: 生存競争 (the struggle for existence), 自然淘汰 (natural selection) and 優勝劣敗 (the superior win, the inferior lose) were all made between about 1879 and 1882, in the same rooms [1].
The text in English. The Japanese word glossed back into English in the Meiji dictionaries, from 1909 on.
The historical record
1864 and 1869. Spencer's phrase, Darwin's adoption. Spencer wrote it in The Principles of Biology, in a chapter that tried to restate Darwin in mechanical terms: those will survive whose functions happen to be most nearly in equilibrium with the modified aggregate of external forces. But this survival of the fittest implies multiplication of the fittest. His own footnote, added later, says the expression was here used for the first time, and that Wallace wrote to Darwin in 1866 urging him to adopt it. Darwin did, from the fifth edition of the Origin in 1869: the expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer, of the Survival of the Fittest, is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient, and he retitled his chapter Natural Selection; or the Survival of the Fittest. It is commonly called Darwin's. It is Spencer's, which Darwin borrowed and said so [2].
1881. The fit species. The first Japanese rendering is in the philosophical vocabulary compiled at Tokyo University in 1881: Survival of the fittest, 適種生存, tagged as biology. The second character is species: the fit species survive. The 1884 second edition keeps it [3].
1883. The fit one. The zoologist Ishikawa Chiyomatsu had heard Edward S. Morse lecture on Darwin at Tokyo University in 1877–79. In 1883 he published the lectures, and opened them: since Darwin's book on the origin of species came out it has swept the world, and those who study the principles of the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest come one on the heels of another, in Europe and America and among our own scholars too. This is the word in the form that won, and the oldest book that carries it. One character changed: the fit one, not the fit species [4].
1884. Spencer himself, in Japanese. A translation of Spencer's Political Institutions, with a preface by Fukuzawa, has the sentence and the word on one page: organisms of one kind compete with each other, the fit survive and the unfit perish … if the great way of the survival of the fittest and the struggle for existence were not in this universe, no living power would develop at all. Later in the book the word does Spencer's social work: by the principle of survival of the fittest, only the races suited to despotism will survive under it. The book that made the phrase's three sisters household words, Katō Hiroyuki's 人権新説 of 1882, does not use this one at all [5].
1886–1906. The spread, and the rival. By 1886 a professor was explaining why old plays survive by the principle of survival of the fittest; by 1888 a satirist applied it to temperance societies. From 1891 a rival form appears, 最適者生存, with the superlative, the fittest, and both Meiji translations of the Origin, in 1896 and 1905, use it for Darwin's own sentence. The Library's count settles which form the language kept: 2,739 books for 適者生存, 35 for the superlative. The word's curve runs from fourteen books in the 1880s to a peak of 734 in the 1920s, and three times as many of them are in the social sciences as in the natural [6].
1898–1924. China, from Japan. Yan Fu's Chinese version of Huxley in 1898, the book that carried evolution to a generation of Chinese readers, does not use the four characters: its phrase is things compete, heaven selects, and its fit are the most suitable. The four-character word appears in Chinese in 1902, in an essay Liang Qichao wrote in exile in Japan; a Tokyo Japanese-Chinese dictionary defines it for Chinese students in 1908; by 1924 it is Sun Yat-sen's, asking whether the Chinese are the fit or the unfit. The word was made in Japan and went west [7].
The sense across time. The word has meant one thing in every use: the surroundings decide who lives. What moved was the size of the thing that fits. A species in 1881; an individual in 1883; a race in 1884, in Spencer's own Japanese; a nation by 1924, in Chinese. Darwin's reason for adopting it, that it says less than selection, with its hint of a selector, is the reason it has been so easy to carry from biology into everything else. The dictionaries also record the standing objection, that the fit survive and the survivors are the fit is a circle, and the standard answer, that this is a matter of wording [1].
What is not a source. Not Darwin's coinage: Spencer's, in 1864, which Darwin adopted five years later. Not the strong survive: 適 is suited, and the phrase is not 弱肉強食, the strong eat the weak. Not Chinese: the four-character form went from Japan into Chinese, not the other way. Not 加藤弘之's: the father of Japanese social Darwinism used the phrase's sisters and not this one.
The word in English
1909 to 1925. Tekisha-seizon 適者生存 n. Survival of the fittest in a Japanese-English dictionary of 1909, the earliest such entry known; a 1909 idiom dictionary still gives both Japanese forms, the fit one and the fit species; a 1918 English-Japanese dictionary pairs it with Katō's word, 適者生存、優勝劣敗; a 1925 dictionary of words born from English spells it out in katakana [8].
Today. The English the scroll is sold under is the one every dictionary gives from 1909 on.
A reading
This is Spencer's phrase in Ishikawa's Japanese. Spencer coined it and Darwin borrowed it, and the Japanese story is the better one: a vocabulary that made the fit a species, a zoologist who made it a person from lectures he had sat through, a superlative rival that the Darwin translators preferred and lost, and a word that went on to China. 適 is suited, not strongest. The form that won is the form the language kept.
References
- 「適者生存」・「生存競争」・「自然淘汰」・「優勝劣敗」, 精選版日本国語大辞典・デジタル大辞泉・最新地学事典, at kotobank. https://kotobank.jp/word/適者生存
- Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Biology, vol. I, Part III ch. XII, 1864 (1898 revised text), § 164–165, at en.wikisource; Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 5th ed., 1869, ch. III–IV, at Project Gutenberg.
- 哲学字彙, 井上哲次郎 et al., Tokyo University, 1881, scan 47; 2nd ed., 1884, scan 68. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/752942/1/47 · https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/994560/1/68
- 石川千代松 (trans.), 動物進化論 (from Edward S. Morse's lectures, 1877–79), 1883, scan 2. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/832826/1/2
- 濱野定四郎・渡邊治 (trans.), 政法哲学 (Herbert Spencer, Political Institutions), 1884, scan 19 and scan 142; 加藤弘之, 人権新説, 1882, National Diet Library Digital Collections (no occurrence). https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/783387/1/19 · https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/783387/1/142
- 外山正一, 演劇改良論私考, 1886, scan 28; 独尊子 (鈴木天眼), untitled satire, 1888, scan 99 and scan 103; 立花銑三郎 (trans.), 生物始源, 1896, scan 105; 種之起原, 開成館, 1905, scan 120; 加藤弘之, 自然界の矛盾と進化, 1906, scan 85 and scan 162. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/992443/1/28 · https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/887483/1/99
- 嚴復 (trans.), 天演論 (Thomas Huxley), 1898, at zh.wikisource; 梁啓超, 論中國學術思想變遷之大勢, 1902, at zh.wikisource; 東中大辞典, Tokyo, 1908, scan 665; 孫文, 三民主義, 民族主義第三講, 1924. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1087757/1/665
- 佐久間信恭・広瀬雄, 和英大辞林, 1909, scan 754; 神田乃武・南日恒太郎, 英和双解熟語大辞典, 1909, scan 752; 齊藤秀三郎, 熟語本位英和中辭典, 1918, scan 673; 英語から生れた現代語の辭典, 1925, scan 290. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/870204/1/754 · https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/990169/1/752 · https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1681530/1/673 · https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1900269/1/290