time: the refreshing river 



more to tell us, but even that, as Zuckerman points out,i does not 

 tell us much. Man's precursors probably lived a social life similar to 

 that of all old-world monkeys and apes and were probably frugivorous. 

 Probably at the beginning of the Pliocene, some twenty million years 

 ago, when forests were reduced and the earth became more arid, a 

 group of Primates with more plastic food-habits than the rest, managed 

 to survive by becoming carnivorous. This transfer from a grazing to 

 a hunting life must have had important social and sexual consequences, 

 for with the change of diet there had to go a sexual division of labour 

 in food-collection. Hence there had to be a repression of the dominant 

 impulses which lead to polygyny in sub-human Primates. "The price 

 of our emergence as Man," writes Zuckerman, "would seem to have 

 been the overt renunciation of a dominant Primate impulse in the field 

 of sex. The price of our continued existence may well be further repres- 

 sions of dominant impulses, and further developments^ of the co- 

 operative behaviour whose beginnings can be vaguely seen in our 

 transition from a simian to a human level of existence." 



This was precisely Spencer's "blind spot." But we must take a 

 closer look at co-operative behaviour, the necessary foundation for 

 a higher order of human society. What has so far been said amounts 

 to this, that evolution is not finished, that organisation has not yet 

 reached its highest level, and that we can see the next stage in the 

 co-operative commonwealth of humanity, the socialisation of the 

 means of production.^ Among the many evidences of this, there is 

 space only to refer to two or three. 



In the first place, the class-stratification such as we know it in all 

 civilised communities, modelled on the pattern of Western Europe, is 



1 S. Zuckerman, article "The Biological Background of Social Behaviour," in 

 Further Papers in the Social Sciences (London, 1937)- 



2 Italics mine. 



^ For lack of space we pass here over the enormous gulf between the first beginnings 

 of social organisation and the inadequacies of social organisation still existing in our 

 own time. This emphasises the continuity of the factor of co-operation, with all the 

 psychological adjustments that that implies. But it is essential to realise that within the 

 sociological level there have been separate stages or levels, analogous perhaps to the 

 mesoforms which we find as we pass from true liquids to true crystals. Thus it seems 

 that the first attainment of an efficient agriculture was of enormous significance since 

 it provided a food surplus and led to the formation of classes when this surplus came 

 under partly or wholly private ownership. Similarly the first attainment of efficient 

 machinery for the production of commodities had a profound effect, in the "'industrial 

 revolution" and the appearance of a truly proletarian class. The problems of today pre- 

 suppose the accomplishment of these great changes in human social life; hence it is 

 useless to ask why a classless society or the conscious control of production could not 

 have been introduced, centuries ago. 



t 260 



