5 22 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



us, was at first but a very flickering and transitory feeling as opposed 

 to our inherited selfishness; but, for all that, it was the bridge by which 

 men first began to cross from self-love to benevolence, and to become 

 social beings. An interesting survival of this primeval state of things 

 may perhaps be traced in Roman law, under which the father's control 

 over his children seems to point back to the time when men did their 

 duty to their children only as part of themselves, and exercised to the 

 fullest extent the right to do what they pleased with their own. A less 

 pleasing reminiscence of the primitive conscience is to be found in the 

 plea of the slaveholders, that they do not ill-treat their slaves because 

 it is for their own interests to keep them alive, healthy, and happy. 



4. The Social Stage. At a certain period of his mental growth 

 primeval man must have begun to form conceptions or ideas of the 

 various objects that came within his experience, so as to be able to say, 

 "This is a flower, and this a stone, and this a man." Now his idea of 

 man must of necessity have been framed upon his knowledge of himself. 

 Whatever qualities or properties he recognized as belonging to himself, 

 these he would transfer to all other beings of whose likeness to himself 

 in all essential conditions he had become aware. Hence it would fol- 

 low that as he had a distinct and vivid impression of his own right to 

 existence, he would have the same impression, in a faint and dubious 

 form, of other men as possessing the same right. It seems probable 

 that to this rudimentary perception of mutual likeness may be traced 

 all that part of our social feelings which owes its origin to an intel- 

 lectual as opposed to physical sources. Anyhow this recognition of 

 likeness selects for man the kind of beings with whom he is willing to 

 enter into those social relations to which he finds himself impelled in 

 part by inherited instincts, and in part by the necessity of living to- 

 gether with other creatures in the same territory, and upon the same 

 means of subsistence which they must procure in common. Thus the 

 important fact emerges that man brought (in germ) the idea of right 

 and wrong with him to the formation of society, and did not obtain it 

 as a result of social intercourse acting through the agency of pains and 

 pleasures. From the moment that A, B, and C, recognizing a likeness 

 of nature, and therefore a possibility of intercommunion, resolved upon 

 trying the experiment of living together, they must have perceived 

 that they could only do so by acknowledging each other's independent 

 claims to be allowed to live. In respect of all that pertains to life and 

 death they must, in short, have acted up to what Mr. Mill called the 

 "golden ethics" of doing to others as we would they should do unto 

 us. Let us note, in passing, that this "golden" saying, when seen in 

 the light of evolution, becomes not merely a moral rule but also a state- 

 ment of a scientific fact, for it was only by acting in accordance with 

 it that "neighborhood" became possible. "Who is my neighbor but 

 he to whom I assign the same right to exist that I claim for myself 

 from him ? " 



