Mutual Aid | Page 6

and sympathy means to reduce its generality and its importance,
just as human ethics based upon love and personal sympathy only have
contributed to narrow the comprehension of the moral feeling as a
whole. It is not love to my neighbour--whom I often do not know at
all--which induces me to seize a pail of water and to rush towards his
house when I see it on fire; it is a far wider, even though more vague
feeling or instinct of human solidarity and sociability which moves me.
So it is also with animals. It is not love, and not even sympathy
(understood in its proper sense) which induces a herd of ruminants or
of horses to form a ring in order to resist an attack of wolves; not love
which induces wolves to form a pack for hunting; not love which
induces kittens or lambs to play, or a dozen of species of young birds to
spend their days together in the autumn; and it is neither love nor
personal sympathy which induces many thousand fallow-deer scattered
over a territory as large as France to form into a score of separate herds,
all marching towards a given spot, in order to cross there a river. It is a
feeling infinitely wider than love or personal sympathy--an instinct that
has been slowly developed among animals and men in the course of an
extremely long evolution, and which has taught animals and men alike
the force they can borrow from the practice of mutual aid and support,
and the joys they can find in social life.
The importance of this distinction will be easily appreciated by the

student of animal psychology, and the more so by the student of human
ethics. Love, sympathy and self-sacrifice certainly play an immense
part in the progressive development of our moral feelings. But it is not
love and not even sympathy upon which Society is based in mankind. It
is the conscience--be it only at the stage of an instinct--of human
solidarity. It is the unconscious recognition of the force that is
borrowed by each man from the practice of mutual aid; of the close
dependency of every one's happiness upon the happiness of all; and of
the sense of justice, or equity, which brings the individual to consider
the rights of every other individual as equal to his own. Upon this broad
and necessary foundation the still higher moral feelings are developed.
But this subject lies outside the scope of the present work, and I shall
only indicate here a lecture, "Justice and Morality" which I delivered in
reply to Huxley's Ethics, and in which the subject has been treated at
some length.
Consequently I thought that a book, written on Mutual Aid as a Law of
Nature and a factor of evolution, might fill an important gap. When
Huxley issued, in 1888, his "Struggle-for-life" manifesto (Struggle for
Existence and its Bearing upon Man), which to my appreciation was a
very incorrect representation of the facts of Nature, as one sees them in
the bush and in the forest, I communicated with the editor of the
Nineteenth Century, asking him whether he would give the hospitality
of his review to an elaborate reply to the views of one of the most
prominent Darwinists; and Mr. James Knowles received the proposal
with fullest sympathy. I also spoke of it to W. Bates. "Yes, certainly;
that is true Darwinism," was his reply. "It is horrible what 'they' have
made of Darwin. Write these articles, and when they are printed, I will
write to you a letter which you may publish. "Unfortunately, it took me
nearly seven years to write these articles, and when the last was
published, Bates was no longer living.
After having discussed the importance of mutual aid in various classes
of animals, I was evidently bound to discuss the importance of the
same factor in the evolution of Man. This was the more necessary as
there are a number of evolutionists who may not refuse to admit the
importance of mutual aid among animals, but who, like Herbert

Spencer, will refuse to admit it for Man. For primitive Man--they
maintain--war of each against all was the law of life. In how far this
assertion, which has been too willingly repeated, without sufficient
criticism, since the times of Hobbes, is supported by what we know
about the early phases of human development, is discussed in the
chapters given to the Savages and the Barbarians.
The number and importance of mutual-aid institutions which were
developed by the creative genius of the savage and half-savage masses,
during the earliest clan-period of mankind and still more during the
next village-community period, and the immense influence which these
early institutions have exercised upon the subsequent development of
mankind, down to