PATTERNS FOR LIVING TOGETHER 115 



utmost importance to a clear and critical analysis and under- 

 standing of theories of government. Another, and funda- 

 mentally different view of the essential origin of law rather 

 widely prevailed in the early part of the nineteenth century. 

 It is historically associated with the name of John Austin, the 

 English jurist, who first propounded it in his famous Province 

 of Jurisprudence Determined (1832). He was one of the 

 founders of University College, London, and its first professor 

 of jurisprudence. In his first class was John Stuart Mill, who 

 disagreed in toto with Austin's views on political subjects, but 

 said of him after his death that he had been the man "to whom 

 he (Mill) had been intellectually and morally most indebted." 

 Austin's view, in essence, was that all laws properly so-called 

 are commands addressed by a human superior to a human in- 

 ferior, and that the system or institution of government by law 

 evolved from this basis. 



Naturally and obviously this is a position with which no stu- 

 dent of animal behavior could be expected wholly to agree. 

 He would quite willingly admit that many laws were, and are, 

 stated verbally in the form of commands, but that fact seems 

 to him to be of only rhetorical importance. What the student of 

 behavior dislikes is the implication of Austin's argument, of 

 which he was fully aware and accepted, that the whole system of 

 government by law came into being because a few individuals 

 were created superior, and a great many inferior, and that the 

 former governed the latter by commanding them to do, or not to 

 do, certain things. Such a view is repugnant to the biologist be- 

 cause it so completely neglects the evolutionary background and 

 basis of human behavior. Mammalian social behavior is not of 

 the pattern implicit in Austin's^ formulation. Proof of this is 

 abundant, for example, in Eraser Darling's important study 

 A Herd of Red Deer^ already quoted in these lectures. Herd 

 leaders are not commanders. They function much more as 

 special sense organs for the group, that is the herd. They watch 

 and listen for the group, while the other members tend to the 

 other businesses of life. The group reactions of the herd are 



