648.
"Utility" in respect of the acceleration of the speed of evolution, is a different kind of "utility" from that which is understood to mean the greatest possible stability and staying power of the evolved creature.
649.
"Useful" in the sense of Darwinian biology means: that which favours a thing in its struggle with others. But in my opinion the feeling of being surcharged, the feeling accompanying an increase in strength, quite apart from the utility of the struggle, is the actual progress: from these feelings the will to war is first derived.
650.
Physiologists should bethink themselves before putting down the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength: "self-preservation" is only one of the results thereof.—Let us beware of superfluous teleological principles!—one of which is the whole concept of "self-preservation."[4]
[4] See Beyond Good and Evil, in this edition, Aph. 13.
651.
The most-fundamental—and most primeval activity of a protoplasm cannot be ascribed to a will to self-preservation, for it absorbs an amount of material which is absurdly out of proportion with the needs of its preservation: and what is more, it does not "preserve itself" in the process, but actually falls to pieces.... The instinct which rules here, must account for this total absence in the organism of a desire to preserve itself: hunger is already an interpretation based upon the observation of a more or less complex organism (hunger is a specialised and later form of the instinct; it is an expression of the system of divided labour, in the service of a higher instinct which rules the whole).