Full text of EVOLUTION AND ETHICS, by Sir Arthur Keith

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Preface

THE name of Sir Arthur Keith deserves to be associated with those of Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley in the study of the evolution of man. During the last half century, Keith has been the foremost British student of human phylogeny and of fossil man, and, in the opinion of many, has exhibited the greatest mastery of this subject shown by any anthropologist. In his early career Sir Arthur acquired a sound knowledge of anatomy of the great apes which he subsequently utilized in interpreting the fragmentary remains of fossil man and demonstrating their relationships to each other and to subhuman primates. Sir Arthur has always displayed an insight into the physiological, functional aspects of primate evolution almost unique among morphologists. His boldly original theories have sometimes been condemned as fantastic by more pedestrian students of human origins, but subsequent discoveries have vindicated Keith far oftener than they have confuted him. For example, he was for many years the solitary champion of the theory that anatomically modern man, Homo sapiens, existed early in the Pleistocene period, before apelike Neanderthal man lived in the caves of western Europe. This theory has been substantiated by the recent find of the Swanscombe man.

I became, in some sense, a disciple of Arthur Keith when I was a student of anthropology at Oxford nearly thirty five years ago and was making my first essay at studying the bones of ancient man. I was working upon a collection housed in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, of which Professor Arthur Keith was then Conservator. Although Dr. Keith had no formal teaching duties, he was always ready to instruct and to guide aspiring young students. He had the faculty of building up

the self confidence of the ignorant neophyte by insinuating his own ideas and apposite excerpts from his own vast knowledge into the problem of his pupil, in such a way that the latter imagined that the solution was his own and not Keith's. Among the several great teachers I have had, none was his superior.

Few eminent anthropologists have engaged in scientific controversy as often as Sir Arthur Keith, and I know no other who has shown such consistent tolerance, fairness, and courtesy in the face of acrimonious criticism. In the present book, Sir Arthur Keith steps out of his usual role as the interpreter of man's anatomical evolution to present his conclusions upon the relation of evolution to ethics and the function of war in evolution. The findings of Sir Arthur will afford little comfort to facile political idealists who refuse to recognize the brutal and predatory course of man's rise from apedom. For those who believe that it is better to be optimistic and wrong than realistic and right, Sir Arthur's cogent essays, presented at the age of eighty years, will be unpalatable and even subversive. For myself, I have so often begun upon a theory of Keith with the opinion that he was wrong and have had to admit in the end that he was right that I may as well come forward at once to the mourners' bench without waiting for a reconviction of personal sin.

EARNEST A. HOOTON

Harvard University

Cambridge, Massachusetts

July 21, 1946

Foreword

I BEGAN to write this volume in the autumn of 1942, amid surroundings which are briefly described in the opening paragraphs of Chapter 1. I was then living in retirement, with my study shelves packed with the unused gleanings of a lifetime gleanings I had gathered because they seemed to me to throw new light on the origin and evolution of mankind. The gatherings on my shelves may be regarded as my "rickyard" or "stackyard"; I have intended these twenty years past to put them through the mill to thresh, winnow, and dress them, and so to learn what my harvest amounted to. But always, when I was minded to go threshing, some occasion would come along which promised a few additional sheaves; and so it has come about that my final act of husbandry has been postponed to dangerously late in the winter of my days.

There are three main themes on which I believe I can throw light. The first theme relates to the manner in which the final stages of man's evolution or ascent was accomplished. Most anthropologists conceive a sort of Jacob's Ladder up which mankind has ascended, rung upon rung, to reach his present estate; whereas I am convinced that the evidence is now sufficient to permit us to draw a reliable and circumstantial picture of the conditions in which humanity lived while its major evolutionary changes were taking place. My second theme relates to the current conception of race and of nation. Most of my colleagues regard a nation as a political unit, with which anthropologists have no concern; whereas I regard a nation as an "evolutionary unit," with which anthropologists ought to be greatly concerned. The only live races in Europe today are its nations. My third theme relates to war "the greatest evil of the modern world."

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I have sought to trace this evil to its evolutionary roots; these roots descend to prehuman times. War made its appearance as part of the machinery of human evolution. The origin of war, its evolutionary significance, and its development from a border raid of tribal times to the fierce organized wars of modern days are discussed in the eleven final chapters of the present volume.

The natural order in which my three themes should have been handled was to give first an exposition of my theory of human evolution; then to trace the origin of nations, of races, and of the varieties and subspecies of mankind; and lastly to deal with the origin of man's morality and of war. It so happened, however, that in the autumn of 1942 the scientific journal Nature was giving prominence to a claim made by Dr. C. H. Waddington-viz., that science was in a position to provide mankind with a true system of ethics. This system is to be based on a knowledge of evolution a knowledge of the direction in which mankind is now evolving. Any circumstance or condition which helps man along his evolutionary course is to be counted morally good or ethical; anything which hinders man's evolutionary course is to be regarded as morally bad or evil. Now this idea of finding guidance to right behavior in a knowledge of human evolution had engaged my attention for a number of years, and I had found that the evolutionary finger posts were often not only ambiguous, but gave no guidance to what most men count civilized behavior. So much was I in disagreement with Dr. Waddington's thesis that I resolved to reverse my plan, and deal first with the origin of human morality, of human ethics, of human behavior, and in particular with that most unethical of all forms of human behavior war.

Such were the circumstances which induced me to write the present volume. It is with humility that I have to acknowledge that my task was almost half done before I discovered that Herbert Spencer had studied evolution for a lifetime in the hope of finding an absolute standard of what must be counted virtue and what must be regarded as vice; when he came to write the preface to the second volume of his Principles of Ethics, in 1893 (he was then seventy three years of age), he had to confess that his search had been in vain.

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In the year 1896 there appeared a book with the title Pioneers of Evolution, by Mr. Edward Clodd (1840 1930). Mr. Clodd was a successful banker, a thinker, a man of letters, with a gift of happy expression, and was an authority on the myths which man has brought with him from prehistoric times. Early in January 1897, Pioneers of Evolution was reviewed in the illustrated London News; the opening sentences of the review run as follows:

Evolution is a donkey that nearly everybody drives to market now-a days. No beast in recent years has been so over driven, so overridden, and so over burdened as this poor moke; none has become a more fit subject for the Society for Prevention of Cruelty; never was a beast in such demand.

I blush when I read the words in which this barbarous attack on a worthy book was couched, for I was the writer of the review. A just retribution has overtaken me, for here am I leading the same old donkey to market, and showing off his paces, in the year 1944. By way of extenuation I would plead that the beast I am now exhibiting is sounder, more warrantworthy, than the one I belabored in 1897.

The word "evolution," which appears so frequently in these chapters, is one with a wide variety of meaning. The sense in which I have sought to use the term is explained in Chapter 23. Readers may find it profitable to consult this chapter before beginning on the others. Another word of uncertain connotation I have employed very frequently viz., "Nature." What I have in mind when I use this term is defined in an appendix (p. 239).

Chapters 1 to 18 appeared as monthly installments in the Literary Guide from January 1943 to July 1944; Chapter 24 was published in the Rationalist Annual of 1944; the remaining chapters make their first appearance. The chapters that appeared in the Literary Guide met with a mixed reception. My answers to the main criticisms were contributed in the form of an article to the Literary Guide of August 1944. This article forms an appendix to the present volume.

A. K.

Contents

1. Introductory 3

2. Evolution and Ethics 6

3. The Behavior of Germany Considered From an Evolutionary

Point of View in 1942 10

4. Human Life: Its purpose or ultimate end 14

5. Life: Its ultimate purpose 18

6. Life's Purpose as Seen by the Evoutionist 22

7. Virtue and Vice as Factors in Evolution 26

8. National Independece and Individual Liberty:

Their Place in the Scheme of Human Evolution 31

9. Desire for Individual Liberty and Its Evolutionary Implications 35

10. Is Man a Domesticated Animal? 40

11. Slavery: an Evolutionary Crime 45

12. Universalism: A world Brotherhood 49

13. Universalism in Theory and in Practice 54

14. Criticisms of Universalism 58

15. Can Christianity be Harmonized with Evolution? 63

16. Christian Ethics Versus Evolution 67

17. Christianity Versus Evolution 72

18. Civilization: Its Dawn and Progress 76

19. The Rise of Civilization in England 81

20. The Influence of Civilization on Man's Evolution 85

21. Civilization Seeks to Suppress the Evolutionary

Elements of Man's Mentality 90

22. Civilization and Human Evolution Aim at Divergent Goals 95

23. Evolution: An Interpolation 102

24. Can War be Regarded as an Ethical Process? 107

25. The Importance of Realizing that the Behavior of

The Natural Man is Regulated by a Double Code

of Morals 114

26. The Interrelationship Between War and Civilization 121

27. The Civilized Mind Seeks to Eliminate Warlike Qualities 127

28. How War Came to be Accepted by Christianity 134

29. How the Author Came to Link War to Evolution 140

30. War, Evolution, and Race 147

31. Man's Enmity Complex and Its Role in Human Evolution 154

32. The Evolution of Patriotism and of War 160

33. War as Practiced by Tribal Groups of Primitive Humanity 168

34. The Coming of Fierce War and its Effects on Human

Evolution 175

35. War is a Manifestation of a Hidden and Unrecognized Force 184

36. Concerning Pacifica Peoples 194

37. The Conditions which have made for Peace in China and

India 201

38. The Pros and Cons of War 209

39. The Pros and Cons of Peace 218

40. An Evolutionary Interpretation of The Second World War 226

Appendix - Replies to Critics 236

Chapter 1

Introductory

THE OUTBREAK OF WAR FOUND ME IN MY seventy fourth year, occupying a cottage on the Darwin estate, in the county of Kent, my landlord being the British Association, to whom I pay rent quarterly. Next door to my cottage the Royal College of Surgeons of England has built an institution for surgical research hy means of a great gift made to it eleven years ago by Sir Buckston Browne. I have certain duties in connection with this institution, mainly honorary. All the research men were speedily called away (some, alas, never to return), and thus I am left with more spare time than ever before to devote to accumulations on the shelves of my study accumulations of observations and annotations bearing on the evolution of mankind which are the harvest of a full half century of fairly active years. It is now October 1942; the war has entered its fourth year; my task of extracting my facts, of classifying them under multitudinous headings, and of stowing them away in accessible portfolios is almost finished, and if strength is left I hope soon to begin writing. It is when one comes to composition that the significance of such gatherings becomes fully apparent.

There is another preliminary matter which I should like to mention before entering on my full text. All through my life, which has been that of a student, the needs of the physical man would continue to assert themselves. I had to seek the open country from time to time to find restoration in active physical exercise. I became madly infatuated with golf in my early manhood, and had the hope that some day I might become proficient at the game a hope which never materialized: a lively knowledge of the human body proved a handicap rather than a help.

On my arrival in my present abode, links in a neighboring valley

offered my heart all its desired opportunities; I could take a club and a few balls, cross a field, and have an hour's game at any time. With the war the spirit for golf disappeared; the links returned to pasturage, but, fortunately for me, a new exit for my energies forced itself on me. I had become a farmer in a small way or rather a "grazier." Our pasturage had been permitted to "run wild"; neighboring farmers counted they conferred a favor by turning their cattle into our fields. I bought eight bullocks and two sheep, and began to manure the fields and at the same time to hand hoe them a very ancient practice, digging out the weeds and encouraging our native grasses. This daily field game, which I owe to Nazidom, proved to be infinitely more exhilarating than golf. My readers may think it a small matter that my bullocks now number ten and my sheep twelve, but the increase represents the meat rations of twenty adults for a whole year. And so I salve my war conscience by working in the fields in the mornings, and my anthropological conscience by spending my nights in my study. All would be well but for the anxieties and sorrow which war has brought to all our homes.

I belong to the thinning ranks of the "grandfather" generation of anthropologists, and, as is the way of grandfathers, center my hopes on the rising race of grandchildren. Since the last war I have seen a galaxy of young talent appear not bred, to be sure, to the study of orthodox anthropology, but pursuing special lines of research, out of which the advance of anthropology in the future will emerge students of heredity and of that wonderful microcosm in the nucleus of the fertilized ovum where reside chromosomes and genes, the machinery of creative evolution. I venture to name some of those ripening or ripe hopes of the present or future: R. A. Fisher, J. B. S. Haldane, Julian Huxley, Lancelot Hogben, C. D. Darlington, Joseph Needham, and C. H. Waddington. All of them are bold men of great energy and enterprise, resolved to find answers to questions we older men were almost afraid to frame. The manner in which human beings should behave toward each other in their tribes or nations has been determined hitherto by the Church, which claims to have a revelation of the divine will touching this matter, or by moral philosophers, who base the rules of right and wrong on the

accumulated experience of mankind, ancient and modern. Dr. Waddington, who is a fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge, where Darwin was a student in the twenties of last century, startled the readers of Nature (September 6, 1941, p. 270)^¹ by claiming that science was now in a position to formulate the principles of ethics that is, the manner in which members of a community should comport themselves. He assumes, and I think his assumption is justifiable, that the object or business of life is to evolve. He therefore holds that everything which helps man along his evolutionary path is ethically good and therefore a virtue, while everything which retards is an evil a vice. "The business of Science," he declared, "is to reveal the character and direction of the evolutionary process in the world as a whole."

This, then, was the outfit with which Dr. Waddington set out in a search for scientific guidance in the management of human affairs: a knowledge of how evolution is working out its effects in our midst must provide the laws regulating our social behavior. He gained immediate support from Darlington, Huxley, and Needham. The Bishop of Birmingham, Dr. Barnes, was also in agreement, but since he regarded evolution as a manifestation of the Creator's purpose, evolutionary ethics might still be regarded as of divine origin. The Dean of St. Paul's, Dr. Matthews, was shocked by Dr. Waddington's proposal. "It was," he held, "a disastrous error to suppose that natural science can solve the central problem of ethics." Nor were the natural philosophers convinced; Professor Ritchie, Dr. de Burgh, and Dr. Joad rejected evolution as a source of ethics out of hand. Although Dr. Haldane took no part in this symposium, I infer he would have been in opposition. In Science and Ethics (1928) he wrote: "Science cannot answer . . . why I should be good." This would certainly have been the verdict of the great Huxley; it is also the opinion of Leonard Darwin, in his ninety third year. "Science can offer no finality," wrote Professor H. Levy.^²

Now, the problem discussed by Dr. Waddington and his colleagues in the pages of Nature is one which has engaged my

attention for over a quarter of a century. We shall all agree, I think, that what for lack of a better term we may call man's "natural behavior" is regulated and instigated by those emotions, feelings, tendencies, and predilections which collectively make up "human nature." We shall agree, too, that human nature has been built up bit by bit, under the operation of evolutionary processes in past times, and even now in all human societies hereditable changes are being effected in man's basal mentality. Early in my inquiries I came to the conclusion, which my later work has confirmed, that human nature has not only been built up by evolution, but that every element in it might serve as a part of the machinery which brings about the further development of a tribe or community. Every reaction of our nature which works for the integration of the tribe and for its perpetuation - for without integrity and perpetuation there can be no evolutionary achievement we may call good; its action, in respect of the tribe, we may call virtuous. All those reactions which tend to undo mutual respect and sympathy, or which weaken that reproductive altruism on which the perpetuation of a community, tribe, or nation depends, we may speak of as evil; from an evolutionary point of view they constitute vice. With all this which I hold in common with Dr. Waddington, I disagree with him in supposing that evolutionary knowledge can provide a basis for modern ethics.

Chapter 2

Evolution and Ethics

IN ORDER THAT I MAY DEVELOP MY REASON OR reasons for thinking that a knowledge of evolution will never enable a man to reduce ethics to a scientific formula, I must (1) touch upon the manner in which evolution worked in long-past ages, when mankind became broken up into a multitude of races, some of which survive; and (2) note the manner of its operations in a modern community such as the people of Germany. It is possible that many are still misled, as I myself was at one time, by the evolutionary teaching of the great Huxley.

He was the St. Paul of Darwinism, and, like the proselytizing apostle, gave a personal twist to the doctrine of the master in his teaching. In 1893, just two years before his death, Huxley gave the Romanes Lecture in the University of Oxford, choosing the very subject I am now discussing evolution and ethics. In that famous lecture he maintained that man's ethical nature, far from being favored by evolution, was at war with it. Huxley pictured the early evolutionary human struggle as being of the nature of an individual contest man against man. This is not the theory or doctrine which Darwin expounded in The Descent of Man (1871); he supposed that man, before he even emerged from apedom, was already a social being, living in small scattered communities. Evolution in his eyes was carried out mainly as a struggle between communities team against team, tribe against tribe. Inside each team or tribe the "ethical cosmos" was at work, forging and strengthening the social bonds which made the members of such a team a co operative whole. These mental bonds, Darwin supposed, had been evolved from those inborn ties that link members of a family together the love of parents for their children, of children for parents, and of children for each other. Thus in the early stages of human evolution we find competition and co operation as constituent elements of the evolutionary process; Huxley's "cosmic process" and "ethical process" working not in opposition, but in harmony, to produce the races of the modern world.

Co operation and unity give strength to a team or tribe; but why did neighboring tribes refuse so stubbornly to amalgamate? If united, they would have got rid of competition and struggle. Why do human tribes instinctively repel every thought of amalgamation, and prize above all things independence, the control of their destiny, their sovereignty? Here we have to look beneath the surface of things and formulate a theory to explain tribal behavior. How does a tribe fulfill an evolutionary purpose? A tribe is a "corporate body," which Nature has entrusted with an assortment of human seed or genes, the assortment differing in some degree from that entrusted to every other tribe. If the genes are to work out their evolutionary effects, then it is necessary that the tribe or corporation should maintain its integrity through

an infinity of generations. If a tribe loses its integrity by a slackening of social bonds, or by disintegration of the parental instincts, or by lack of courage or of skill to defend itself from the aggression of neighboring tribes, or by free interbreeding with neighbors and thus scattering its genes, then that tribe as an evolutionary venture has come to an untimely end. For evolutionary purposes it has proved a failure. I shall use a simile to illustrate my meaning. In modern times members of a wealthy family tend to intermarry, and thus prevent the disintegration of family property. Ancient and modern tribes did, and do, the same thing to conserve the potentialities of their genes.

Let us look for a moment at the means which Nature has adopted to secure the integration, separation, and isolation of her evolutionary units or tribes. Seas, mountains, and deserts serve to separate communities; but it is not on physical barriers that Nature depends for the isolation of tribes. The barrier on which she depends has grown up, or been evolved, in the basal parts of man's mental constitution. We may speak of this barrier as tribal mentality, with which I have dealt at some length elsewhere.^¹ Tribal mentality is dual, or double, in its action; at one moment it acts intratribally, thus serving the co operative welfare of the tribal members. This we may call the good or virtuous constituent of human nature. Then at another moment, when directed toward neighboring tribes, its action is reversed; it becomes intertribal or extratribal; friendship turns to enmity. Tribal mentality in its intertribal manifestations, although good from an evolutionary point of view, must be counted evil or vicious in any conceivable system of ethics, for its action is cruel, merciless, and completely immoral. The reader will now realize why I hold out no hope of gaining a scientific standard of ethics from a study of evolution at least so long as evolution is Nature controlled, as it has been in the world of humanity hitherto.

Before we approach the study of evolution as manifest in the modern world, particularly among the nations of Europe, it is necessary, for the purpose of my argument, to touch on two

of the more important bonds which serve to unite members of a tribe or a nation into a corporate body. The first of these relates to the soil the tribal territory. Every tribe, no matter how primitive or how small it may be, claims to occupy and own a certain area of country, the frontiers of which are known to every tribesman. Tribesmen are bound to their native soil by a strong emotional bond; they regard its integrity as a sacred trust; if the life of a tribe is to continue, frontiers must be preserved. The second intratribal bond I must mention is that of common kinship, real or assumed, sometimes spoken of as the "blood bond." The inborn emotions generated by kinship supply the bonds of mutual sympathy and mutual service, which emotions are active only inside the limits of a community, tribe, or nation. Such are some of the ways in which evolution works.

When history raises the curtain on Germany, in the century which preceded the dawn of Christianity, we find her population divided into some forty independent tribes, warring with each other and with the outside world. No doubt the tribes which the Romans met with, or heard of, represented federations or compulsory amalgamations of earlier smaller tribes. If Germany had been like the rest of Europe before the practice of agriculture reached her, which was late in the fourth millennium B.C., her territory must have been divided among some 150 or 200 small local tribes or communities. Thus, when our historical record begins, modern evolutionary progress, as indicated by reduction in number and increase in size of tribal units, had made a very considerable advance. In the centuries which followed the Roman period local self determination must have flourished, for by the seventeenth century there were 250 independent states established within the frontiers of what is now modern Germany. In the eighteenth century, under the sword of Frederick the Great, the number was reduced, mainly by the absorptive power and capacity of Prussia, so that in 1814 they numbered thirty nine. By 1871, under Bismarck, only twenty-five states retained their independence. With the coming of Hitler and the establishment of the Third Reich, in 1933, Germany suddenly emerged as a unitary state a single tribe or

nation numbering over eighty millions,^² with a single leader and a central government; but for the strength of religious consciences she would have had a single national church. Under no stretch of imagination can war be regarded as an ethical process;^³ yet war, force, terror, and propaganda were the evolutionary means employed to weld the German people into a tribal whole. No, the modern methods of evolution are, from an ethical point of view, immoral.

Chapter 3

The Behavior of Germany Considered from an Evolutionary Point of View in 1942

VISITORS TO GERMANY IN 1934 FOUND AN emotional storm sweeping through masses of the people, particularly the more educated. The movement had much in common with a religious revival. The preacher in this case was Adolf Hitler; his doctrine was, and is, tribalism; he had stirred in the emotional depths of the German people those long-dormant tribal feelings which find release and relief in mutual service; men and women who had been leading selfish lives or were drifting aimlessly were given a new purpose in life: service to their country the Third Reich. It is worth noting that Hitler uses a double designation for his tribal doctrine National Socialism: Socialism standing for the good side of the tribal spirit (that which works within the Reich); aud Nationalism for the ethically vicious part, which dominates policy at and outside the German frontiers.

The leader of Germany is an evolutionist not only in theory, but, as millions know to their cost, in the rigor of its practice. For him the national "front" of Europe is also the evolutionary "front"; he regards himself, and is regarded, as the incarnation of the will of Germany, the purpose of that will being to guide the evolutionary destiny of its people. He has brought into

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modern life the tribal and evolutionary mentality of prehistoric times. Hitler has confronted the statesmen of the world with an evolutionary problem of an unprecedented magnitude. What is the world to do with a united aggressive tribe numbering eighty millions!

We must not lose sight of the purpose of our visit to Germany; it was to see how far modern evolutionary practice can provide us with a scientific basis for ethical or moral behavior. As a source of information concerning Hitler's evolutionary and ethical doctrines I have before me Mein Kampf, extracts from The Times covering German affairs during the last twenty years, and the monthly journal R.F.C. (Racio Political Foreign Correspondenee), published by the German Bureau for Human Betterment and Eugenics and circulated by that bureau for the enlightenment of anthropologists living abroad. In the number of that journal for July 1937, there appears in English the text of a speech given by the German Fuhrer on January 30, 1937, in reply to a statement made by Mr. Anthony Eden that "the German race theory" stood in the way of a common discussion of European problems. Hitler maintained his theory would have an opposite effect; "it will bring about a real understanding for the first time." "It is not for men," said the Fuhrer, "to discuss the question of why Providence created different races, but rather to recognize that it punishes those who disregard its work of creation." I may remark incidentally that in this passage, as in many others, the German Fuhrer, like Bishop Barnes and many of our more intellectual clergy, regards evolution as God's mode of creation. God having created races, it is therefore "the noblest and most sacred duty for each racial species of mankind to preserve the purity of the blood which God has given it." Here we have expounded the perfectly sound doctrine of evolutionary isolation; even as an ethical doctrine it should not be condemned. No German must be guilty of the "greatest racial sin" that of bringing the fruits of hybridity into the world. The reproductive "genes" which circulate within the frontiers of Germany must be kept uncontaminated, so that they may work out the racial destiny of the German people without impediment. Hitler is also a eugenist. Germans who suffer from

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hereditable imperfections of mind or of body must be rendered infertile, so that "the strong may not be plagued by the weak." Sir Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics, taught a somewhat similar evolutionary doctrine namely, that if our nation was to prosper we must give encouragement to the strong rather than to the weak; a saving which may be justified by evolution, but not by ethics as recognized and practiced by civilized peoples. The liberties of German women are to be sacrificed; they must devote their activities to their households, especially to the sacred duty of raising succeeding generations. The birth rate was stimulated by bounties and subsidies so that the German tribe might grow in numbers and in strength. In all these matters the Nazi doctrine is evolutionist.

Hitler has sought on every occasion and in every way to heighten the national consciousness of the German people or, what is the same thing, to make them racially conscious; to give them unity of spirit and unity of purpose. Neighborly approaches of adjacent nations are and were repelled; the German people were deliberately isolated. Cosmopolitanism, liberality of opinion, affectation of foreign manners and dress were unsparingly condemned. The old tribal bonds (love of the Fatherland, feeling of mutual kinship), the bonds of "soil and blood," became "the main plank in the National Social program." "Germany was for the Germans" was another plank. Foreign policy was "good or bad according to its beneficial or harmful effects on the German folk now or hereafter." "Charity and humility are only for home consumption" a statement in which Hitler gives an exact expression of the law which limits sympathy to its tribe. "Humanitarianism is an evil . . . a creeping poison." "The most cruel methods are humane if they give a speedy victory" is Hitler's echo of a maxim attributed to Moltke. Such are the ways of evolution when applied to human affairs.

I have said nothing about the methods employed by the Nazi leaders to secure tribal unity in Germany methods of brutal compulsion, bloody force, and the concentration camp. Such methods cannot be brought within even a Machiavellian system of ethics, and yet may be justified by their evolutionary result.

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Even in that result we may harbor a doubt: can unity obtained by such methods be relied on to endure?

There are other aspects of Nazi policy which raise points which may be legitimate subjects of ethical debate. In recent years British men of science have debated this ethical problem: an important discovery having been made a new poison gas, for example is it not the duty of the discoverer to suppress it if there is a possibility of its being used for an evil purpose? My personal conviction is that science is concerned wholly with truth, not with ethics. A man of science is responsible for the accuracy of his observations and of his inferences, not for the results which may follow therefrom. Under no circumstances should the truth be suppressed; yet suppression and distortion of the truth is a deliberate part of Nazi policy. Every anthropologist in Germany, be he German or Jew, was and is silenced in Nazi Germany unless the Hitlerian racial doctrine is accepted without any reservation whatsoever. Authors, artists, preachers, and editors are undone if they stray beyond the limits of the National Socialist tether. Individual liberty of thought and of its expression is completely suppressed. An effective tribal unity is thus attained at the expense of truth. And yet has not the Church in past times persecuted science just in this Hitlerian way? There was a time, and not so long ago, when it was dangerous for a biologist to harbor a thought that clashed in any way with the Mosaic theory of creation.

No aspect of Hitler's policy proclaims the antagonism between evolution and ethics so forcibly as his treatment of the Jewish people in Germany. So strong are the feelings roused that it is difficult for even science to approach the issues so raised with an unclouded judgment. Ethically the Hitlerian treatment of the Jews stands condemned out of hand. Hitler is cruel, but I do not think that his policy can be explained by attributing it to a mere satisfaction of a lust, or to a search for a scapegoat on which Germany can wreak her wrath for the ills which followed her defeat of 1918. The Church in Spain subjected the Jews to the cruelty of the Inquisition, but no one ever sought to explain the Church's behavior by suggesting that she had a

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lust for cruelty which had to be satisfied. The Church adopted the Inquisition as a policy; it was a means of securing unity of mind in her flock. Hitler is an uncompromising evolutionist, and we must seek for an evolutionary explanation if we are to understand his actions. When the Huguenots fled to Germany they mingled their "genes" with those of their host and disappeared as an entity. The Jews are made of other stuff: for two thousand years, living amid European communities, they have maintained their identity; it is an article of their creed, as it is of Hitler's, to breed true. They, too, practice an evolutionary doctrine. Is it possible for two peoples living within the same frontiers, dwelling side by side, to work out harmoniously their separate evolutionary destinies? Apparently Hitler believes this to be impossible; we in Britain and in America believe it to be not only possible, but also profitable.

It must not be thought that in seeking to explain Hitler's actions I am seeking to justify them. The opposite is the case. I have made this brief survey of public policy in modern Germany with a definite object: to show that Dr. Waddington is in error when he seeks to place ethics on a scientific basis by a knowledge of evolutionary tendencies and practice.

Chapter 4

Human Life: Its Purpose or Ultimate End

IN THE COURSE OF GATHERING INFORMATION concerning man's morality and the part it has played and is playing in his evolution, I found it necessary to provide space for slips which were labeled "Life: Its Ultimate and Proximate Purposes." Only those who have devoted some special attention to this matter are aware of the multitude of reasons given for the appearance of man on earth. Here I shall touch on only a few of them; to deal with all would require a big book. The reader may exclaim: Why deal with any of them! What has ultimate purpose got to do with ethics and evolution! Let a man with a clearer head and a nimbler pen than mine reply. He is Edward Carpenter, who wrote Civilization: Its Cause and Cure (1889).

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It is from the sixteenth edition (1923) I am to quote, p. 249:

If we have decided what the final purpose or Life of Man is, then we may say that what is good for that purpose is finally "good" and what is bad for that purpose is finally "evil."

If the final purpose of our existence is that which has been and is being worked out under the discipline of evolutionary law, then, although we are quite unconscious of the end result, we ought, as Dr. Waddington has urged, to help on "that which tends to promote the ultimate course of evolution." If we do so, then we have to abandon the hope of ever attaining a universal system of ethics; for, as we have just seen, the ways of national evolution, both in the past and in the present, are cruel, brutal, ruthless, and without mercy. Dr. Waddington has not grasped the implications of Nature's method of evolution, for in his summing up (Nature, 1941, 150, p. 535) he writes "that the ethical principles formulated by Christ . . . are those which have tended towards the further evolution of mankind, and that they will continue to do so." Here a question of the highest interest is raised: the relationship which exists between evolution and Christianity; so important, it seems to me, that I shall devote to it a separate chapter. Meantime let me say that the conclusion I have come to is this: the law of Christ is incompatible with the law of evolution as far as the law of evolution has worked hitherto. Nay, the two laws are at war with each other; the law of Christ can never prevail until the law of evolution is destroyed. Clearly the form of evolution which Dr. Waddington has in mind is not that which has hitherto prevailed; what he has in mind is a man made system of evolution. In brief, instead of seeking ethical guidance from evolution, he now proposes to impose a system of ethics on evolution and so bring humanity ultimately to a safe and final anchorage in a Christian haven.

The late Dr. Edward Westermarck, a profound student of morality and of evolutionary method, regarded man's search for a final purpose as an outstanding example of human weakness and vanity. In Memories of My Life (1929), he relates how

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three of his women students at the London School of Economics came to him and put this question: "Why are we here?" He replied: "Such a question should not be asked; here we are, and cannot alter it; questions which cannot be answered should not be asked." Wherein Dr. Westermarck revealed that, although he had mastered human morality, he remained ignorant of human nature. Since ever man became a conscious being he has asked this question, and will continue to demand an answer to the end of time. The Westminster divines who were assembled at Westminster by Charles I were not afraid to ask the question, and also to answer it. They made it the first question of the Shorter Catechism, "What is man's chief end?" and replied: "To glorify God and enjoy him for ever." As far back as I can remember, I was word perfect in that question and its answer. Even today, after brooding for a long lifetime over the explanation given by the divines of why I am here, I have failed to master the full meaning of its words. If such is a true answer to the question, then why has man been given a nature which is so incapable of fulfilling such a mode of life? No human community could observe this injunction with any degree of strictness, not even one day in seven, and survive on this earth as we know it. No; the "chief end" cannot be as the Westminster divines formulated it.

Then there is the explanation given by St. Augustine. According to this father of the Church we have been sent into the world to make it into a "City of God," to bring all mankind under the beneficent law of Christ, to establish a perpetual reign of peace, and ultimately to provide the Creator with an abundant harvest of human souls. The Church has been seeking to establish such a City for well nigh two thousand years. Why has St. Augustine's science made so little headway up to this present time? Is it not because human mentality is so aptly fitted to carry out the law of evolution, and so ill framed to carry out the law of Christ? If St. Augustine's scheme had been also that of Nature, then she would have fashioned the instinctive basis of human mentality in conformity with the Augustinian scheme; it is axiomatic in the making of human laws that they must be framed in conformity with human nature if their

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observance is to be secured. We can scarcely suppose that this elementary consideration was overlooked when Nature's evolutionary scheme of things was established.

Let us look for a moment at what Dr. Julian Huxley has to say about "Divine Purpose." In his latest work, Evolution (Harper, 1942, p. 576), we find the following passage:

The purpose manifested in evolution, whether in adaptation, specialization, or biological progress, is only an apparent purpose. lt is just as much a product of blind forces as is the falling of a stone to earth or the ebb and flow of the tides. It is we who have read purpose into evolution, as earlier men projected will and emotion into inorganic phenomena like storm or earthquake. If we wish to work towards a purpose for the future of man, we must formulate that purpose ourselves. Purposes in life are made, not found.

In brief, man's appearance on earth is accidental, not purposive.^¹ Now, I admit at once that there is a certain amount of truth in Julian Huxley's contention, but it is not the whole truth. Let us take a concrete illustration. Early in the eighth century B.C. certain local tribal communities on the banks of the Tiber became consolidated, built a city, and began to bring neighboring rival tribes and communities into subjection. Every move produced unforeseen opportunities, which may be regarded as the result of accident or chance; such opportunities the Romans seized and utilized. The purpose of securing a safe frontier was continued for eight centuries, and the Roman Empire came into existence. Was the growth of the Empire accidental or purposive? It was both; as events happened they were utilized by the Roman intellect for a purpose. To take another example: yesterday I was stung by a wasp; my enemy no doubt acted reflexly and unconsciously, nevertheless purposively, for I was driven from its nest; and the sting and poison bag seemed to me cleverly adapted for their purpose, whether the sharp thrusting sting came into existence in a planless scheme of evolution or not. Evolution cannot be planless for this reason. Living protoplasm, even in its simplest form, is purposive; unless it can absorb food, assimilate it, turn it into energy, rid itself of by-products,

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and reproduce itself, it cannot live. I feel certain that sooner or later it will be found that the "genes" themselves, which determine us body and soul, are really physiological and therefore purposive in their action. Nature, in short, is fundamentally purposive in all its doings.

Chapter 5

Life: Its Ultimate Purpose

IT IS PROBABLE THAT THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN Dr. Julian Huxley and myself, discussed at the end of my last chapter, is due to a difference in the meaning we each have attached to "purpose." I suspect he reserves the word for a plan or scheme which has been thought out and then applied, just as an architect's thought materializes in a building; whereas I use the word to indicate anything which serves a purpose, no matter how that thing or quality has arisen. The human hand, in this sense, is definitely and wonderfully purposive. However this may be, Dr. Huxley is not alone in denying purpose to the advent of man. Thomas Hobbes was also of his opinion; in the eleventh chapter of Leviathan (1651) he asserts that there is "no finis, no summum bonum, no Greatest Good." Professor Malinowski (1884 1942) gave his verdict in these words: "A human society has no biological aim or needs of its own."^¹ Perhaps it would have been more accurate if he had written "has no conscious biological aim." The writer of a leader in Nature^² is more cautious. This is his statement: "The aim of society must be to insure not its own formal permanence . . . but the maintenance of such conditions as will best keep open a way for man to the attainment of his ultimate destiny, whatever that destiny may be." Men whose opinion on this matter deserves our respect see a plan in life, but, like the writer in Nature, find its interpretation beyond them. Dr. Gilbert Murray, in Religio Grammatici (1918), expresses his conviction thus: "The great unknown purpose which the eternal spirit of man seems to be working

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out on earth." And this from Sir Francis Galton, eugenist and evolutionist: "We are exceedingly ignorant of the reason why we exist, confident only that individual life is a portion of some vaster system that struggles arduously onwards, towards ends that are dimly seen or wholly unknown to us . . . carried on by innumerable personalities who ceaselessly succeed each other:"^³ Here I add the opinion of a man I hold in high esteem that of Leonard Darwin, sole surviving son of Charles Darwin.^⁴ In a letter to me dated April 1, 1935, occurs the following passage:

I feel that the Universe is an unsatisfactory affair if our striving to do good has nothing behind it. Science cannot serve as a guide to conduct. Human improvement must come by evolutionary methods. If there is free will there must be something outside science.

In a subsequent letter (March 14, 1938) he touches on what our aims should be: "to strive for the maximum welfare of all sentient beings" an ideal very similar to that expressed by his father (Descent of Man, Chap. IV, p. 188). Even Herbert Spencer "perceived the dim outline of a gigantic plan . . . tending always towards perfection."

It was useless for Dr. Westermarck to declare that it is illegitimate, in a scientific sense, to ask the question, "Why are we here?" or for Dr. Huxley to declare that the purpose is only apparent, not real. Thinking men will ask this question and continue to ask it until the end of time. And if science cannot give an answer, then such inquiries will assuredly fall back on those who claim that the final purpose of human existence has been vouchsafed to them by a direct revelation from the Creator. Those who accept an answer from this source will do well to remember that revelation, when it condescended to describe the manner of man's creation, went sadly astray, and it is not impossible that it may be equally in error as to the meaning of man's existence. We may entertain a lively hope that as our knowledge of the economy of the universe grows in amount and in precision, science may make a closer and closer approach to the solution of the mystery of final purpose.

Since the days of ancient Greece until now there have been

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philosophers who maintain that the purpose of human life is to, develop personality to its fullest possible degree; that every child is born to bring to full stature the potentialities of its mind and body. If it fails, then the purpose of life has failed or been misused. We may go to the writings of the late Professor L. T. Hobhouse for a modern statement of the "personality theory" of life:^⁵ "The good for each man lies in the realization of what is in him . . . but only as far as the common good makes this possible . . . the rights of each are such as it is good for all to maintain."

Carlyle's statement is more emphatic^⁶ and no doubt reflects his acquaintance with German philosophy: "The meaning of Life here on earth might be defined as consisting in this: to unfold your self, to work what thing you have a faculty for. It is a necessity for the human being, the first law of our existence."

Huxley was of opinion that the mystery of life lay beyond the reach of the human intellect, but nevertheless in his Romanes Lecture^⁷ touches on the matter with which we are now dealing. The passage runs: "Creation of conditions more favorable than those of the state of Nature . . . to the end of facilitating the free expansion of the innate faculties of the citizen so far as it is consistent with the general good."

Huxley, in this passage, regards "the free expansion of the innate faculties," not as a "purpose," but as a means of producing "an organized polity, in which and by which man may develop a worthy civilization, capable of maintaining and constantly improving itself until the evolution of the globe shall have entered its downward course . . . and once more the state of Nature prevails." In this remarkable passage Huxley appears to regard the development of a "worthy civilization" as the final purpose of man on earth. He writes as if the evolution of man were already completed. For Galton and for Karl Pearson the future evolution of man is the problem of problems; that, too, is my opinion.

Mr. Clive Bell^⁸ develops a theory of human existence which

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has much in common with that of Huxley; only stress is laid, not on the development of a material civilization, but of a civilized state of mind, one whose aesthetic and ethical qualities would bourgeon in the sunshine of an ideal state of society.

Let me give, as briefly as I may, the names of famous men who have regarded the development of personality as the purpose of existence. Aristotle:^⁹ "Now with us reason and intelligence are the end of Nature." Dante: "Right constitutions work for freedom in order that men may exist for their own sakes." Kant: ". . . not happiness . . . but the evolution of all the germs God has implanted in man's nature." The Marquis of Halifax (1633 95): "The free development of human personality is the purpose of earthly existence. . . . Free will is the method deliberately chosen by God." Herbert Spencer:^¹0 "Social life will have no other end than to maintain the completest sphere for individual life." "Man exists in order that he may develop his soul" is a theological explanation of life's purpose. As "soul" is a component of "personality," the theological explanation falls within the present category.

The development of personality as an explanation of human existence could never have entered the thoughts of mankind living under an evolutionary or tribal discipline. The life and security of a tribesman depend on the life, strength, and integrity of his tribe; without its protection he is undone, and his mentality is fashioned to its membership. If he had postulated a purpose in life it would have been the endurance, or perpetuity, and betterment of his tribe. With the coming of civilization, some seven thousand years ago, and the segregation of tribesmen in cities, tribal organization was broken up. Statutes and codes of written law replaced the customary automatic tribal law. The degree of individual liberty we who live in great cities and under protective governments now enjoy (in time of peace) are conditions totally new to mankind. It was the detribalization of mankind that made the formulation of a personal or individual purpose possible.

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Chapter 6

Life's Purpose as Seen by the Evolutionist

IN MY PORTFOLIO OF "ULTIMATES" THERE IS A compartment labeled "Hedonistic," reserved for annotations of those who regard happiness as the main aim of human existence. I shall deal briefly with them, for I regard happiness not as an end, but as a means to an end. The ideal of Jeremy Bentham (1748 1832) to give "the greatest happiness to the greatest number" is rather an instruction to a government than the formulation of a final purpose. His contemporary, the Rev. T. R. Malthus, held that the Creator's purpose for man was to "replenish the earth" and enjoy "the greatest sum of human happiness." "The ultimate purpose of creation," wrote Herbert Spencer, "is to provide the greatest amount of happiness." Side by side with this I may set Jane Welsh Carlyle's view of happiness: "I have everything here to make me happy except the facalty of being happy."^¹ I agree with Hume in regarding the feeling of happiness "as a gift of Nature."^² Aristotle was essentially a hedonist: if a line of conduct gave the doer happiness, then it was right or "good"; if not, then it was wrong.^³ Clearly Aristotle regarded happiness not as an end, but as a means toward the "Good Life." To which I may append Nietzsche's query: "Good for what?"

Another compartment in my portfolio of "Ultimates" is labeled "Miscellaneous," in which we find unusual reasons given in explanation of a final purpose. When men approach serious questions they are apt to bring with them a relieving breath of wit or humor. Novikow^⁴ suggests that man's purpose is "to have the maximum of enjoyment with the minimum of work." Justice Holmes, son of Oliver Wendell Holmes, said this: "The chief end of man is to frame general propositions, and such propositions are not worth a damn." Oakesmith^⁵ regarded peace, universal

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and perpetual, as the major purpose of human life. Malthus attributes to Mohammed "procreation of worshippers" as the final purpose of life; as a practice, if not as a purpose, the Church of Rome anticipated Mohammed.

All the theories or explanations of human existence which I have reviewed so briefly and so inadequately fail in this: they throw no light upon human nature man's instinctive urges, social aptitudes, impulses, tendencies, feelings, desires, emotions, and passions, which are inherited and transmitted by every child born into the world. When we see a man dressed in a soldier's uniform and equipped with arms and ammunition we at once infer what his "purpose" in life is: victory is his goal. If we are to discover a purpose for humanity we have to apply the same mode of reasoning. We have to study the birth equipment of humanity, particularly that part of its mentality which lies below the level of the fully lighted field of consciousness namely, the basal part which makes itself known and active only when it rises into the conscious field. It is from a study of the manifestations which come from the basal or unconscious field of man's mentality that we are likely to get clues to his evolutionary equipment and destiny. We may not reach a vision of his final victory or goal, but we shall discover the way along which Nature means him to go toward a goal. And, seeing that under the discipline of Nature he has moved in the course of a few millions of years from a place among the apes to his present unique position in the Kingdom of Life, we have every reason to hope that, if an evolutionary discipline is maintained, he may still continue on a rising course.

Whichever theory we adopt to give a rational explanation of human existence, that theory must take into account and explain the mental nature we see at work in all modern communities. We have to take account of the good or virtuous gifts with which man's nature has been endowed, and also those inborn proclivities which we regard as evil, antisocial, or vicious. Now, man's good gifts require no "bush"; they are apparent and acknowledged his power to love his fellows and to sympathize with them in their sorrows; his unbounded capacity for unselfishness or altruism. Does not every generation labor without thought of

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repayment to rear, feed, clothe, and educate the generation which in due time will take its place? Our present task, rather, is to account for man's inborn evil predispositions, his power to hate, to demand an eye for an eye, to slake his thirst for revenge, to explain his ruthless, merciless, cruel passions. There are, too, his ambitions, his hunger for priority, for place, for rank, for power, for profit, for praise. Why are most men competitive, aggressive, pugnacious, covetous, envious, and self-seeking? Man is apt to blame and to find fault with his rivals, to pour on them scorn and contempt. Then we must take account of his personal pride, his vanity, his snobbishness, his egoism, his intolerance, and his fanaticism, as well as his vigorous lusts of the flesh always seeking to break bounds. Why is he so predisposed to accommodate his conscience to his desires, to be partial to all that is his own his family, his party, his community? All these traits, and many more, may be grouped under the heading of "Original Sin." The theological mind accounts for the presence of such vicious traits in our nature by a childish myth attributed to a hypothetical garden. I was under the impression that no serious minded inquirer gave a thought to the theological theory. In this I find I am mistaken. At the moment of writing there came into my hands The Times' Literary Supplement of October 17, 1942 (p. 508), where a writer ends his review of Dr. Julian Huxley's Evolution with this question: "Must we appeal, with the theologians, to a fundamental falling away of the universe from its destined purpose in short, to 'Original Sin'?"

Now, if the reader will put down in column form my abbreviated list of "original sins" he will find that in human nature there is an opposite virtue inborn desires or predispositions which produce a contrary result. Against hate we must place love; against egoism, altruism; against cruelty, mercy; against ambition, humility; against pugnacity, pacifism; against lust, purity; against nationalism, cosmopolitanism. It is the duality of our mental make up which has led to the diversity of opinion regarding man's nature. Man, it is asserted, is peaceful; he has also been described as essentially militant. Both statements are true; our verdict depends on which side of the mental coin is

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uppermost to our view; the man who is a pacifist at one moment may be a pugilist the next. A good tribesman clings to his fellows and tells them the truth; he repels men of neighboring tribes and tells them lies. The real problem which faces us is this: How can the duality of human nature be explained? The evolutionist can offer an explanation which is agreeable to reason; the theologian has to appeal to superstition for an answer.

It is only when we realize the conditions under which the later stages of the evolution of man were carried out that we come by a clue to the duality of his mental nature. Conceive, for a moment, what these conditions were. Throughout all the final stages of our evolution, mankind throughout the whole earth was segregated into small local communities or tribes. This was certainly so during the entire Pleistocene period, which at a moderate estimate endured for half a million years perhaps a million. Tribalism was everywhere down to the beginnings of the fifth millennium B.C., when somewhere in southwest Asia agriculture was discovered, town building and detribalization set in, and the era of civilization began. Tribalism was Nature's method in bringing about the evolution of man. I have already explained what a tribe really is a corporation of human beings entrusted with a certain capital of genes. The business of such a corporation is to nurse and develop its stock of genes to bring them to an evolutionary fruition. To reach such an end a tribal corporation had to comply with two conditions: (1) it had to endure for a long age; (2) it had to remain intact and separate from all neighboring and competing tribes. Human nature was fashioned or evolved just to secure these two conditions continuity through time and separation in space. Hence the duality of man's nature the good, social, or virtuous traits serving intratribal economy; the evil, vicious, or antisocial qualities serving the intertribal economy and the policy of keeping its genes apart. Human nature is the basal part of the machinery used for the evolution of man. When you know the history of our basal mentality one fitted for tribal life do you wonder at the disorder and turmoil which now afflict the detribalized part of the world?

What, then, is the explanation which the student of human

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evolution has to offer as a final purpose for man's existence? It is not, as the Victorian scientists thought, to permit the individual man or woman to develop his latent potentialities; but to permit a closed society, be it tribe or nation, to develop its collective potentialities of brain and of body as an evolutionary unit. It is only when we make the assumption that evolution aims at the production of societies not of individuals that we come by a satisfying explanation of man's dual mentality, and the constituent elements of human nature.

Chapter 7

Virtue and Vice as Factors in Evolution

MORAL PHILOSOPHERS, ANCIENT AND MODERN, are dominated by the conviction that the moral law is "written in the human heart." By this I understand them to mean that every child born in the world has a fundamental part of its brain ingrained in such a way that when it comes into full activity it favors certain lines of conduct and tends to reject other lines. When such inborn tendencies materialize and rise up into the field of consciousness there comes into action another mental mechanism which "reviews" the intention or action, the "reviewer" being what is named "conscience." Conscience is not confined to man, but in him it has become developed to a supreme degree of watchfulness and power. If a man's conscience is satisfied, he regards an action as virtuous; if dissatisfied, vicious.

So much for the machinery of morality. We have now to note the role of morality so far as it affects the processes concerned in human evolution. It is never safe, in an inquiry of this kind, to neglect Aristotle; he was a biological philosopher of the highest rank, often dropping a profound truth as if it were a mere afterthought. Take this as an example: "Even in the lower animals there is some natural 'good' principle above themselves which aims at the good peculiar to them."^¹ Put into modern thought: "The evolutionary destiny of a species is guided by an

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instinctive control of conduct." Or this from Politics:^² "The 'good' of anything is that which preserves it" i.e., gives it a "survival value." "Morality contributes to world purpose," said Professor Henry Sturt.^³ "Propensities work for the preservation of the individual or of the race" (Adam Ferguson, 1722 1816). In Moral Sentiments Adam Smith^⁴ asks his readers to "admire how everything is contrived for advancing the two great purposes of Nature the support of the individual and the propagation of the species." And again:^⁵ "Nature, however, when she implanted the seeds of irregularity in the human breast, seems, as upon all other occasions, to have intended the happiness and perfection of the species." We may, therefore, say that in the year 1759 Adam Smith regarded human morality as part of Nature's machinery for securing man's perfection or evolution. Or take this statement of Gibbon, the historian:^⁶ "The Wisdom of Providence frequently condescends to use the passions of the human heart ... as instruments to execute its purpose" a truth which is illustrated in the evolutionary development of modern nations. A quotation from A. Rivarol (1788) brings us nearer to the line of my argument: "Virtues are so because they are useful to the human race." The converse must be equally true of vices. Hartmann (1842-1906), whom I regret to quote at secondhand, wrote thus: "Instinct, which is the conscious willing to an unconscious purpose, has to do with the preservation of the individual and with the perfection and ennoblement of the species"^⁷ in other words, with the evolution of the species.

Now, these opinions regarding the nature of instinctive tendencies, and of virtue and vice, are very near to the conclusions to which my researches have led me namely, that such morality or ethical behavior as favors the evolutionary growth and progress of a tribe is approved by the tribal conscience and is regarded

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as a virtue, while an opposite kind of behavior is not approved and is named a vice. "Nature," as Gibbon might have written, "has not entrusted human destiny to man's unfettered reason, but has heavily biased his judgment to serve her own evolutionary purpose." "The individual is foolish," said Burke, "but the species is wise."

The theory seems so straightforward and simple in its implication. Conduct or deeds which help on the evolutionary welfare of a tribe or nation are to be regarded as virtues; the opposite, as vices. Listen to what Hobbes has to say on this matter (1651): "The good or evil thereof [deeds or conduct] depend on the foresight of a long chain of consequences of which very seldom any man is able to see the end."^⁸

Now, what Hobbes has to say regarding measures devised by government to bring about a destiny such as it had in view for its subjects may be true; a civilized government is unlikely to take notice of the destiny toward which evolution is working. Conduct which is beneficial to a tribe at one phase of its development may work for evil in another. Virtue and vice are relative, not absolute, terms. But this is true: through long aeons natural selection has been favoring those tribes which possess inborn predispositions that best serve the destiny toward which evolution works. Man's instinctive aptitudes and predispositions, if they cannot serve as finger posts as to what is right or wrong, must receive the most serious consideration, whether we adopt the laissez faire policy of nature or seek to guide evolution in a direction devised by man. We have to frame our laws to go with the grain of human nature, not against it. Only to this limited extent does a knowledge of evolution help us to devise a system of ethics or to discriminate virtue from vice.

To see evolutionary measures and tribal morality being applied rigorously to the affairs of a great modern nation we must turn again to Germany of 1942. We see Hitler devoutly convinced that evolution provides the only real basis for a national policy. Long before he had reduced greater Germany to a tribal unit he gave this as a "national ultimate":^⁹ "To fight for security and

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increase of our race and people . . . so that our people may be enabled to fulfill the mission assigned to it by the Creator." In the words of Dr. Waddington, Hitler accepted "the direction of evolution as good simply because it is good." The means he adopted to secure the destiny of his race and people were organized slaughter, which has drenched Europe in blood. I shall return to the part which war plays and has played in the evolution of mankind; meantime let me quote from a speech which Goebbels has just delivered:^¹0 "We conquer territory in order to organize it for ourselves . . . not for prestige, but for reasons of state and nation." Such conduct is highly immoral as measured by every scale of ethics, yet Germany justifies it; it is consonant with tribal or evolutionary morality. Germany has reverted to the tribal past, and is demonstrating to the world, in their naked ferocity, the methods of evolution, with this difference what were mere border forays between tribes have become the clash of massed millions using the forked lightning of modern science. She protects her own people and nurses her own Kultur while she seeks to undo all other people and to destroy their civilization.

Take our own case the British case for a contrast. Like the people of Laish, whom the spies of Dan prospected, we "dwelt careless, after the manner of the Zidonians, quiet and secure." We talked much of evolution, but never dreamed of enacting it in our national policy. We were internationally minded; we had, or have, a sense of race, but sought to make all equal in the eye of the law. We were detribalized to a great extent; we valued our individual liberties. But under the impact of war our liberties have had to be surrendered, and have been compelled to adopt a tribal organization and a tribal morality. In spite of ourselves we have had to revert to the sanguinary methods of evolution, in no other way could, nor can, we maintain the population of these islands as an intact, living, and enduring corporation to carry to destiny our amassed inheritance.

The truth is that the ways of natural evolution are incompatible with those of a common and universal civilization. We

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can have one or other as a mode of life, but we cannot have both. To this matter I shall return in a later chapter.

Up to this point I have been using Dr. Waddington's proposal, that science should seek for a fixed standard of ethics by a study of the ways of evolution, as a text for a rather long sermon on the futility of such a search. Before turning to some subsidiary matters, I must touch upon a very widely spread antipathy to consider evolution in any of its forms, particularly in the derivation of man from a simian ancestry. I have had occasion already to mention Mr. Clive Bell; he is a man with an agile brain and a nimble pen; in Civilization he has given the world an aesthete's opinion of evolution and of man's true purpose in life. I quote from the Pelican edition (1938), p. 56:

"And if we reply, the sole end and purpose of man's existence be but to continue his species, if the individual have no value, save as a means to that end, does it matter? That any given race of apes should become extinct signifies not a straw, and if a man is to live for no other purpose than that for which apes live, his continued existence becomes equally unimportant."

It matters to this extent: if a certain optimistic branch of Miocene apedom had become extinct, then there would have been no Clive Bell, no Civilization, and the world would have been all the poorer. I feel confident that, if evolution had succeeded in tracing man from a fallen angel and not from a risen ape, Mr. Bell's antagonism to evolution would have gone by the board. Darwin, in the last paragraph of The Descent of Man, has already answered Mr. Bell:

"Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there, may give him hope for a still higher destiny in the distant future."

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Chapter 8

National Independence and Individual Liberty: Their Place in the Scheme of Human Evolution

THE CONCLUSION REACHED IN MY LAST CHAPTER namely, that modern civilization is at war with natural evolution has been given a terse expression by Professor S. J. Holmes:^¹ "Racial advancement may be nature's way, but it certainly is not man's." We may give this thesis a concrete illustration if we consider the significance of a word that is ever on our national lips independence, or absolute sovereignty. The League of Nations had a rational and beneficent aim namely, to bring the nations of Europe under a common law and thus secure peace and prosperity for the peoples of Europe. The League failed. There is no need to cite witnesses as to the cause of the failure; the League failed because every nation concerned refused to surrender even a jot of its full independence or absolute sovereignty. The nations of Europe preferred to remain under the law of natural evolution rather than submit to the dictates of reason.

Now, when we find the most learned nations in the world behaving in a way which to a civilized mind seems utterly irrational we must seek for an explanation below the levels where reason holds sway. Let us apply to national behavior the theory I have been advocating in former chapters namely, that human nature has been framed to serve the evolutionary processes which are molding mankind in the present, and will continue to mold them in the future, just as they have done in the distant past. Now, the instinctive feelings which have been enslaved for the purposes of evolution either lie outside the reach of reason or are so strong in themselves that they bring reason into subjection. The application of the theory to national behavior gives irrationality a rational place in the scheme of things, and should bring home to statesmen the obdurate fortifications which

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have to be leveled in the minds of men before federation can conquer evolutionary purpose in Europe.

To see a modern people in the throes of evolution, let us go to Finland in the critical spring of 1940. Listen to the leader of the trade unionists as he described the situation:^²

"The Finnish people cannot be said to have agreed among themselves in peace time. But the moment a real danger threatened us like a thunder cloud, a mighty wind swept over our nation, erasing even the most deep seated differences of opinion and directed the gaze of every citizen to the one all important matter namely, the defense of our liberty and independence and the protection of our women and children.... We shall continue the struggle so long as there is a single man left who is capable of wielding a weapon."

Let us see if we can obtain a reasonable explanation of the state of mind which had been roused in the people of Finland by certain demands made on their country by powerful Russia. At first there was no threat against the corporate life of the Finns; they were requested to surrender certain strong points which were coveted by Russia for defensive purposes. Now, suppose the ultimate purpose of human existence had been such as we have passed in review the development of personality, the provision of greatest happiness to the greatest number, the growth of the soul, glorification of the Creator, security, peace, prosperity; then the Finns ought gratefully to have accepted the demands of Russia. Could not all of these objectives in life have been developed more freely and fully under the protection of Russia than under the weaker power of the smaller state? We receive no explanation from the accepted theories of life. But if we turn to the theory that I have put forward namely, that human nature has been fashioned to advance the cause of evolution then we obtain a ready and sufficient explanation. An evolutionary unit, be it a community, tribe, or a nation, must, to fulfill its destiny, maintain not only its organization and its continuity, but also its independence its right to work out its own destiny. If a nation loses its independence, then it has no longer the power to develop its separate destiny or to pursue the policy of self determination. Thus I regard the spirit of independence

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which we have seen roused in the hearts of the Finnish people as a fundamental part of the machinery of human evolution.

In every man there is an instinctive and passionate reaction if his person or liberty is attacked. It is not so clearly recognized that a threat to the life or to the independence of a tribe or of a nation calls forth a mass reaction still more powerful and passionate. How strong that reaction can be is seen in the case of Finland. A warlike spirit flamed up; life, individual liberty, ease, and wealth were sacrificed in the passionate hope that the nation might be free to pursue its way to a self appointed destiny. In such reactions the civilized mind sees only a mass hysteria, a form of madness. The rationalist, on the other hand, who has more extended acquaintance with the ways of Nature, will see in the warlike spirit which rises in a nation when its independence is threatened, not a manifestation of madness, but a demonstration of the stern measures used by Nature to carry out her evolutionary purpose. If madness it be, then there is only one cure to bring to an end the methods pursued hitherto by Nature for human advancement. Civilization and Nature are at war.

I have cited the case of Finland to illustrate my evolutionary explanation of "Independence." Many other recent instances are at my disposal, but I shall use only a few of them. There is the case of Yugoslavia. On the morning of March 27, 1941, Mr. Winston Churchill broadcast this announcement: "Early this morning the Yugoslav nation found its soul. . . . Yesterday its freedom and honour were signed away." All the world knows the price in blood and treasure Yugoslavia has paid and is paying for finding her "soul;" yet all the free peoples of the world thrilled approval when she resolved to fight rather than submit to aggressive Germany. Submission would have brought on her the contempt of even the aggressor powers. No spectacle evokes the applause of the world so much as a little nation fighting against overwhelming odds for its right to guide its own destiny. Does not this go to prove how deeply seated the "soul of independence" is in human nature?

Or we may touch on the cases of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Turkey. In The Times (September 19, 1939) we read: "Poland today lies under the heel of her two invaders, having won immortal

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glory. . . . There is no finis Poloniae." Or this from a speech by Mr. Anthony Eden:^³ "But one factor remains constant, and that is Turkey's firm determination to preserve against any aggressor the greatest treasure any nation can possess her independence." One other example, chosen from ancient times, and I have finished with my evidence relating to the value which tribes and nations attach to a state of independence. Early in the first century of our era Pliny made this observation on a German tribe the Chauci, who lived on the coastal swamps north of the country which is now Holland: "Here the miserable inhabitants live in wave swept cabins. Yet this nation, if conquered by the Romans, would deem their lot of servitude the greatest calamity. Thus does fortune indulge many for their own punishment." In Pliny's verdict on the Chauci's love of independence we detect an anticipation of the outlook of the modern civilized mind.

In the compartment of a portfolio where I keep my observations and notes on "Independence," "Freedom," and "Liberty," I find two almost opposite subjects represented by my gatherings. There are, in the first place, those annotations which relate to the independence or sovereignty of a tribe or people, the evolutionary significance of which has just been discussed. There are, in the second place, those which deal with the freedom or liberty of the individual the extent to which a tribesman or a citizen may speak his thoughts and act as seems good to him. Every tribesman has to serve two masters: one his tribe, the other his own self. He has to serve his tribe so that its life, its integrity, and above all its independence will be maintained. His nature is such that this service is rendered easy for him because it is given almost instinctively. He has also to serve himself: to secure an adequate share of what meat, drink, clothing, etc., are available; to save his "face"; to earn the good opinion of his fellows; to develop his personality, his intelligence, particularly his skill, so that he may become an asset and not a liability to his tribe, and so assist in its evolutionary advancement. If he serves his tribe with the utmost zeal and fidelity, he must sacrifice self; if his own rights come first, tribal interests

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have to go. There is thus a secret antagonism between the development of tribal independence and of personal liberty.

In a tribal organization, even in time of peace, service to tribe or state predominates over all self seeking; in war, service for the tribe or state becomes supreme, and personal liberty is suspended. Germany went onto a war footing, and thus assumed a tribal organization, as soon as Hitler came to power (1933); freedom to join or belong to societies, clubs, unions, political parties, or religious congregations was withheld or placed under Nazi control; the entire population was massed for the service of the state. In Britain, where the fullest personal liberty has become an established tradition, 1939 found us still enjoying and guarding our liberties. To survive against the tribal might of Germany we had to forgo bit by bit most of our privileges and revert to a tribal or evolutionary state. Thus we had brought home to us in barbarous realism the opposition between national independence and personal freedom.

Chapter 9

Desire for Individual Liberty and its Evolutionary Implications

SO IMPORTANT IS THE PRINCIPLE OF INDIVIDUAL liberty in our modern eyes that its consideration cannot be dismissed with the brief statement given to it in my last chapter. Mr. Clive Bell (loc. cit.) goes so far as to say that the greater the freedom which a state permits to its citizens, the higher is the civilization of that state. To a certain extent there is truth in this statement. Presently, when I take up the rise and spread of civilization and consider the manner in which civilization has clogged Nature's machinery of evolution, I shall have something to add to Mr. Bell's statement. Meantime I want to concentrate on the part which personal freedom, in thought and in purpose, has played in the evolution of mankind.

In an inquiry of this kind we cannot neglect Darwin. When The Descent of Man was published, in 1871, John Morley criticized Darwin's conception of human morality. Darwin replied:^¹

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I have endeavoured to show how the struggle for existence between tribe and tribe depends on an advance in the moral and intellectual qualities of the members, and not merely on their capacity of obtaining food. . . . Undoubtedly the great principle of acting for the good of all the members of the same community, and therefore the good of the species, would still hold sovereign sway.

Elsewhere Darwin points out that "no tribe could hold together if murder, robbery, or treachery were common" within its rank.^² Then, in a subsequent passage,^³ we find him alive to the fact that a tribe in which there abounds "patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, sympathy, mutual aid, readiness to sacrifice for the common good" will be victorious (and therefore be "selected") over a tribe poorer in these qualities. It is noticeable that individual freedom is not specified; he knew well that such freedom was of limited extent in every tribal community. Darwin's own life was a demonstration of the advantage which may follow the liberties which attend civilization. Fortune made it possible for him to spend his life, his freedom, in teaching not only his own nation, but all the world, how Nature turns the wheel of evolution.

Professor Malinowski approached closer to the heart of the problem of how individual needs are adjusted to public welfare in a tribal community. He spent some time in a group of islands, the Trobriands which lie some distance to the northeast of New Guinea studying the manner in which life is regulated in their native communities.^⁴ The Trobrianders have a civilization of a kind; they know how to make land and sea produce food for themselves and goods for exchange with neighboring communities. Their mode of exchange that of giving and of receiving gifts offers temptations to private avarice, but it is held in check by another, even stronger, passion or desire in the heart of the islander that of standing high in the eyes of his fellows. The desire for private gain is balanced against that for public reputation. The individual Trobriander, like the rest of us, has personal cravings which demand satisfaction cravings for food, for drink, for love, for social contacts. He is also dominated by an

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even stronger craving that of standing well in the public eye; public or tribal approval is given only for contributions to the public weal. This is human nature constituted for a dual service to self and to tribe.

In a former chapter I have said that in discussing any point in human nature it is always profitable to know what Aristotle had thought of it. There is another authority always worthy of reference Gibbon the historian. I will quote two short passages from Chapter IX of the Decline and Fall, the first bearing on the manner in which German tribes governed themselves. It runs thus:

"Civil governments, in their first institution, are voluntary associations for mutual defence. To obtain the desired end it is absolutely necessary that each individual should conceive himself obliged to submit his private opinion and actions to the judgment of the greater number of his associates."

Thus we see in tribal Germany, as in the Trobriands, the welfare of a community was controlled by public opinion, against which only the strongest natures can remain defiant. If Darwin's writings had been at the disposal of Gibbon, how differently he would have worded the opening sentence! Tribes are of hoary antiquity, and are not voluntary but involuntary associations; birth determines membership, although adoption and slavery were practiced to some extent by German tribes. One may be sure, seeing that individual freedom was regulated by tribal opinion, that any indulgence of liberty by the individual, in word or deed, would be frowned on by the tribe unless it answered to a tribal need.

In a subsequent instructive paragraph Gibbon contrasts the "tribal life" with that seen "in a civilized state":

"The most numerous portion of it is employed in constant and useful labour. The select few, placed by fortune above that necessity, can, however, fill up their time by the pursuits of interest or glory, by the improvement of their estate or of their understanding, by the duties the pleasures, and even the follies, of social life."

Apparently Gibbon was content to see the exercise of freedom confined to the privileged few. No doubt learning was advanced by the few; yet, if we are to measure life by the extent to which it is enjoyed and by the satisfaction given by service to the

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community, it is probable that the humble cobbler had more to his share than he who sought his pleasure in the "follies of social life."

Thus we see that tribal life is inimical to personal freedom; it favors tradition, convention, and conservatism. Nevertheless it was under conditions of tribal life that man came by his most distinctive attribute of mind and body. It was under such circumstances that he came by his great brain, by which he measures the stars, by which he sweeps his imagination along the remote horizons of the past and the distant horizons of the future. The conservatism of tribal life seems hard to reconcile with man's evolutionary advancement. It would be, if past advance depended on a conscious planning by men. Consciousness has played a part, but it has been conscious reason, subject to the working in that nether world of his brain the nether world in which his inborn tendencies and impulses hold sway. As Darwin said in concluding his work on human descent: "Man has risen . . . not through his own exertions." Perhaps he ought to have written: "not through his conscious exertions."

Germany in 1933, and Italy in 1922, reverted to tribal states; personal liberty was suspended in both countries. What effect will that have on the evolutionary development of their peoples? The only law in Germany of 1942 is Hitler's will. Mussolini has described liberty as "a stinking corpse." Recently a group of authors have discussed the meaning of "freedom."^⁵ Croce, in this volume, makes this pronouncement: "Totalitarianism. . . kills free mind ultimately." Every increase of central power gives a diminished peripheral freedom. "Aggressive peoples have no free institutions" (L. T. Hobhouse). It was the opinion of Hume, the philosopher, that "tyranny, despotism, could give no advance. . . big despotisms tend to the debasement of the human species." "There is," said J. L. Garvin in 1935, "an uprising of the human spirit against the regime of submission." "The great military despotisms of Europe regard our freedom as the greatest danger as well as reproach to themselves" (J. S. Mill). Free peoples value their liberties above all else save one thing: that one exception is the integrity and independence of the tribe or nation of

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which they form part. National independence has, as we have seen, an evolutionary significance. If the nation is in danger, individual liberty has to be surrendered to obtain unity of action.

I am a rank individualist. I prize the conditions under which I have lived because they have permitted me to choose my opportunities, to inquire into such matters as interested me, and to publish what I believed to be true, uncontrolled by any central authority. In common with my fellow scientists in Britain, I am convinced that any central control of scientific or other form of inquiry would hamper the increase of knowledge, the progress of civilization, and ultimately the evolutionary power and place of the nation to which we belong. We who surrender our privileges voluntarily, and can therefore resume them when the emergency has passed, should be stronger nationally than a totalitarian state, which employs compulsion to deprive its citizens of their liberties. Even in those long past days when tribalism was universal, would not the tribes which permitted their members the free exercise of their brains be in a stronger position than those tribes which suppressed individual endeavor? Thus I hold that individual liberties, so long as they do not endanger the unity and welfare of the community or tribe, have an evolutionary value.

The proper balance between individual liberty and central authority is a very ancient problem. Ever since human communities came into existence there has gone on in them a silent struggle between the individual seeking to develop his desires and needs and, at the same time, satisfy the collective requirements of his tribe or state. On the one hand we find the German philosopher Hegel (1770 1831) enunciating the theory that the individual exists to supply the needs of the state; on the other we find the English philosopher Herbert Spencer (1828 1903) formulating the opposite opinion that the state exists to protect the liberties of the individual. We have already discussed the evils which attend Hegel's totalitarianism. No tribe could maintain its unity for even a day if it were to practice Spencer's individualism, for every man has his own ideas as to how his needs should best be met. Even in liberty loving Britain and the same may be said of the United States government is carried

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on by so modifying tribalism as to serve a national purpose. For are not our political parties tribal in their mentality, organization, and outlook? Our system works best when there are only two contending parties. When parties become multiplied, as in France and Germany between 1920 and 1930, frustration follows and government becomes ineffective. We succeed because we have found a way of applying our ancient tribal mentality to the needs of a modern nation.

In conclusion I would pass in brief review some of the conceptions of freedom formulated by high minds. Take that given in a recent lecture at the Royal Institution by Dr. Gilbert Murray:^⁶ "We stand for freedom, for man's right to use his supreme gifts of thought, speech, creative art, as the spirit moves . . . we stand for law . . . to seek the truth." "Obey God's will," said Hobbes, "and you are free." Man's difficulty has always been to interpret aright what the divine will really is. "Obedience is freedom," said Hegel; Houston Chamberlain put Hegel's conception into other words: "To be free you must serve; hence loyalty gives freedom." It would give me no consolation if I were in prison to be told that I had perfect freedom as long as I kept within the walls of my cell. A Scottish philosopher, Thomas Reid, whom I hold in high esteem, had a better conception of freedom than his contemporary Hegel. In 1788 he wrote: "Obedience that flows from opinion is real freedom; obedience which is extorted is slavery." And the secret of freedom, as Pericles held, is a brave heart.

Chapter 10

Is Man a Domesticated Animal?

WE SAY AN ANIMAL IS "WILD" IF IT IS AT LIBERTY to live its life under the guidance of its own instinctive or inborn mentality; we also say that the community or species of which such an individual is a unit is "wild" or in a "state of nature" if it is free to work out its own evolutionary destiny. If we say an animal is "domesticated," such as the horse or dog,

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we imply that it has surrendered its liberties; it is no longer the slave of Nature, but becomes that of man. It is no longer "free" to work out Nature's evolutionary scheme, but has to submit to whatever purpose man may impose on it.

I hold that man, with exceptions to be noted later, is not a "domesticated" or "tame" animal; he is still wild and free if any animal that lives under the domination of the evolutionary process can be said to be both wild and free. If we turn to Darwin we find that his opinion, as expressed in The Descent of Man, is in harmony with that just given. Here we read: "In another and very important respect man differs widely from any strictly domesticated animal; for his breeding has never long been controlled, either by methodical or unconscious selection."^¹ Darwin regarded control of mating as a criterion of domesticity. Again, when discussing the possible origin of the breeds of dogs from several wild species, he adds:^² "With man no such question can arise, for he cannot be said to have been domesticated at any particular period." The opinion expressed in another passage^³ is somewhat different: "We might, therefore, expect that civilized men, who in one sense are highly domesticated, would be more prolific than wild men." Here Darwin uses the term "domesticated" in a different sense one I shall return to presently. Dr. Julian Huxley^⁴ expresses his opinion thus: "Man is by far the most variable wild species known."

In the citation just given Darwin uses domestication as a term to cover two conditions which, in their purpose, are quite different: (1) the mental condition which man has bred into animals kept and controlled to serve his purpose; (2) the mental state which men have established in themselves, and to serve their own needs, by living together under the dictates of civilized behavior. It is in the latter sense that most anthropologists use the term "domestication." For instance, the eminent American anthropologist Dr. Franz Boas^⁵ gives his opinion thus: "Civilization has domesticated the European and changed his racial

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type." For Boas a European is a tame type, a Bushman a wild one. In later publications^⁶ he carries the process of human domestication back to the days of early cave man. Eminent German anthropologists, such as Dr. Eugen Fischer and Dr. B. Klatt, regard human races as "domestic" breeds. In a recent issue of Nature^⁷ Dr. T. T. Paterson wrote thus: "After all, man, especially in primitive societies, is essentially a domesticated animal, subject to similar selective processes." No doubt there are primitive peoples who are tame minded; they are subject, like all other communities, to the rigors of natural selection. Dr. Paterson forgets to observe that there is all the difference in the world between such a people and a herd of domestic animals. In the one, selection is carried on unconsciously by the people; in the herd, selection is imposed by an owner.

Civilization seeks to suppress all those primitive instincts in man which formed the main part of the machinery of his evolution in earlier times. Rules of good breeding have to be observed: the animal within must make no appearance on social occasions; all outward manifestations of evolutionary conflict drive, storm, stress, contest are suppressed. And yet, beyond a doubt, civilization is a powerful selective agency; she is favoring those who willingly obey her behests. How many individuals nay, whole communities and races have succumbed because they were either unable or unwilling to shoulder her yoke? For civilization is based on labor, hard labor of body as well as of mind. We shall never understand the present "earthquakes" that shake humanity until we realize that natural selection and evolution are at war with man made civilization.

If civilization, as a selective agency, is eliminating ferocity, cunning, treachery, cruelty, and all the other "wild" traits originally planted in man's mentality, how comes it that the standardbearers of modern civilization the people of Japan in the Far East, the European nations of the West and the descendants of European nations which now inhabit the Americas are the most warlike, the fiercest, and the wildest of all racial stocks? When

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war strips from them the veneer of civilization there is then revealed the old evolutionary equipment of original man. We cannot say that such peoples are tamed or domesticated. It may be pointed out that the peoples just named have come under the sway of civilization so recently that selection has not had time as yet to eliminate what is wild and antisocial. Certain it is that all the peoples who hoisted the banner of civilization in Asia and Europe from the earliest Sumerian times to the last days of the Roman Empire have fallen out of the evolutionary contest all but three, or perhaps I should say four (the people of China, of India, of Egypt, and the people who at one time inhabited Palestine the Jews). They have survived, not because they were warlike, but rather because they were more or less domesticated or tamed. (See Chaps. 36, 37.)

Should man's nature be rebuilt so as to make him a domesticated animal in the full sense of the term? Let us look into the methods man has employed to tame the mentality of his domestic animals. All the animals he has brought under his control have this in common: the ox, the horse, sheep, and dogs, when living in the wild state, are members of a herd, flock, or pack; they are social animals. Now, social animals have, as man has, a dual mentality one side of it is smooth, kindly, social, for home use; the other side is rough, fierce, cruel, for outside or "foreign" use. Man has, century after century, selected for breeding purposes those individuals in which the social or tame traits predominate over those which are fierce or wild. Individuals which struggle against confinement and refuse to give up any part of their passion for freedom are rejected. In this way the social, tame traits have been strengthened, the wild and fierce eliminated, but not altogether. Man still finds it necessary to apply a surgical operation to the stallion and bull to make them really domesticated.

An eminent Russian anthropologist, Dr. Shirokogoroff, lived for some years among the Tungus and has recorded very instructive facts about the herds of tame reindeer kept by that Mongolian people.^⁸ The tame reindeer is mild and friendly and willingly submits to burden or rider. In the rutting season the

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male turns intractable and for the time is unserviceable. The female, on the other hand, in rut becomes tamer and more submissive. There are also herds of wild reindeer, and occasionally a wild male seeks out the domestic herd and leaves progeny. Such hybrid progeny are intractable, seek their freedom when opportunity offers, and join the wild herd. From which we learn that the desire for freedom is an inborn hereditary quality in the mentality of reindeer.

In the dog family man has succeeded in breeding out many wild traits ferocity, cunning, and suspiciousness and has strengthened others, such as affection and intelligence. Breeds have been brought into existence in which certain aptitudes of the wild dog have been given dominance; thus we have come to have watchdogs, sheep dogs, bloodhounds, retrievers, pointers, setters, etc. It is noticeable, too, that domestication may engender a depravity of the dog's sexual instincts. Greyhounds had their courage strengthened by a bulldog cross.

No doubt the selective methods which have been used to tame animals for domestic purposes could be applied to man. Man's "wild" characters could thus be eliminated and true domestic breeds brought into existence. The wild "gene" is dominant to its tame mutant.^⁹ Consider for a moment what man's chief "wild" trait is; it is his inborn instinctive desire for freedom, for individual liberty. General Smuts, in his rectorial address to the students of the University of St. Andrews,^¹0 declared that "freedom is the most ineradicable craving of human nature." More than a century and a half earlier a famous professor of the University of Aberdeen, James Dunbar, said this in a book still deserving of study:^¹1 "The love of liberty is the most stubborn principle of the human heart." As early as 1871 Sir Francis Galton proposed that man would be better without his herd instinct (a wild trait), and that it should therefore be bred out of him. He could not have realized the implications of his proposal, for the herd instinct is but an exaggeration of those social aptitudes which bind men into a community or society. If we could breed

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out the herd instinct from a community, we should reduce it to a conglomeration of asocial individuals. Suppose we could domesticate man by breeding out his love of freedom, then consider what his attitude to life would be. He would become as an ox in the stall, which, protected by his owner, has no purpose in life save to live. A man without a purpose in life is already half dead. No! Man is not a domestic animal; if we could make him one, we should undo him. Nevertheless, as we shall see in the chapter that follows, there are degrees of submissiveness and of tractability in the races of mankind.

Chapter 11

Slavery: An Evolutionary Crime

IN MY LAST CHAPTER I CAME TO THE CONCLUSION that man is neither a domesticated animal nor a tame one. There is one condition, however, I did not mention that of slavery. A slave, like an ox, could be bought or sold, he could be hired out; in some cases he was castrated; he was a chattel: Plato regarded him as an "animate instrument." His right or freedom to take part in the evolutionary drama of his kith and kin was surrendered to his owners. So far as I have been able to discover, no owner ever attempted to establish a slave breed or race. At all times it was found cheaper to buy than to rear slaves.

Eumaeus, the swineherd of Ulysses, was kidnaped as a child by Phoenician pirates. Caesar, after one of the battles fought during the conquest of Gaul, sold 53,000 Belgae into slavery. In the fifth century B.C. the Greeks enslaved 20,000 Persians captured in battle. In Roman times the island of Delos was the center of the slave trade; 10,000 would enter and leave the market in a day.

Sir Henry Maine, in his classical work, Ancient Law,^¹ speaks of slavery as being "as old as human nature," its institution being, as it were, part of man's original sin. It is a sin unpracticed among primitive peoples; they depend for a living on what falls from Nature's table. What use would a slave be to an aborigine of

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Australia? The slave would have no leisure to spare for his master; it would take him all his time to gather or kill enough for himself. If we regard the discovery and practice of agriculture as the beginning of civilization, then we may say that slavery and civilization came together. Civilization is based on physical toil, the sweat of the brow; it was only then that opportunities for the employment of servile labor came into existence. Instead of killing the enemy captured in battle, the conqueror gave his captive life and slavery. When civilization comes within the reach of history, slavery is found to be an established practice in all cities, kingdoms, and empires. And so it persisted everywhere until after the fall of the Roman Empire. It continued, but in an ever diminishing extent, until 1863, when the U.S.A., the last of the great nations to own slaves, set them free.

In their treatment of slaves, nations were guided by what may be called a racial principle. The Hebrew of Palestine was commanded^² to buy his bondmen and bondmaids from neighboring heathen peoples. Such slaves were a "possession" forever. It was otherwise with the unfortunate Hebrew who had to surrender his liberty; he was to receive considerate treatment during his service and be set free after serving until the year of Jubilee came. A similar rule held for Arab peoples; infidels were, for them, the proper subjects for slavery. Greeks made the same distinction; there was one law for themselves, another for the barbarian. Human nature found it easier to be harsh to members of an enemy tribe or nation than to a fellow tribesman or fellow citizen.

Are there men and women who are slaves by nature? Aristotle thought so; perhaps it was an opinion framed to satisfy his conscience and justify the practice of slavery, which so abounded in Athens. Herbert Spencer held that human nature was malleable; if this were true, which I do not believe to be the case, then a free nature might become that of a slave. Dean Swift thought the wildest natures could be tamed to a certain extent. In Gulliver's Travels we read that "every houyhnhnm kept two young yahoos in a kennel and brought them to such a degree of tameness as an animal so savage by nature can be capable

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of acquiring." Xenophon declared that "man was the hardest animal to govern." The truth is that in all races and among all peoples there are men of varying degrees of nature: there are those who are so possessed by a passion for freedom that they would rather surrender life itself than any part of their liberty; and there are those who readily sacrifice freedom for an easy and quiet life. But there are also races and peoples in which the fiercely independent predominate in numbers, and there are others in which the submissive are in the majority. Columbus, when he landed in the Antilles, found two races of natives quite different in their natures. One was the Arawak peaceful, timid, friendly, submissive; the other the Caribs, who were recent arrivals warlike, cruel, aggressive, and independent. The American Indians rejected service under the dominion of the white settlers; they sacrificed their lives rather than submit to slavery. The natives of Africa proved more tractable. Valentin^³ has estimated that about nine millions were carried from Africa and sold in the New World in the latter half of the eighteenth century! The Damaras of southwest Africa were described by Sir Francis Galton as "courting slavery," and that they "follow a master as a spaniel would." On the other hand, Francis Rodd found the Tuaregs of the Sahara to be a people of "intractable character." The peoples of Outer Mongolia are warlike; the Chinese are naturally of a pacific disposition. One has but to compare the warlike, wild tribes of the Northwest Frontier of India with the tame, submissive tribes of Bombay or Madras to realize how differently the passion for freedom can be developed in peoples living in the same subcontinent.

Are there, then, peoples from which the wild instincts, the passion for liberty, have been bred out so that they have become submissive, almost slavelike, in nature? Before coming to such a conclusion let us see if there can be another explanation. England was inhabited by warlike tribes when the Romans came. They were soon brought into a state of subjection, and after being "protected" for nearly four centuries had lost their powers of defense to such an extent that they became an easy prey to Saxon invaders. The native peoples of Gaul were reduced to

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a defenseless state by the same method and at the same historical period. The British Government has protected and thus "tamed" native peoples so that they, too, have become incapable of maintaining their independence. Yet in all these peoples we cannot believe that the wild "genes" have been eliminated - that the passion for freedom has been eliminated; it lies latent because opportunities for its activity have been withheld. But, taking all these circumstances into consideration, we must still conclude that a warlike spirit a passion for liberty finds a much more powerful development in the nature of some peoples than in that of others.

All authorities agree that it is under despotic or totalitarian governments that the independent minded and freedom loving men and women are suppressed or liquidated, and the submissive favored and advanced. If a despotic government endures over a sufficient number of centuries the ultimate result should be a slave minded population. A free democracy works so as to produce an opposite result, selecting the individuals of courage and of enterprise, and so favoring the growth of a stronger and more enduring people.

During the American Civil War (1861 65) men's minds, both in the Old World and the New, were much exercised to find such a justification for slavery as would salve their consciences and leave their purses untouc