THE PROSPECTS OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES 



unit is found on the very lowest levels of existing culture 

 where there is every evidence of its primeval character, and 

 that prehistoric man developed habits of maintenance and 

 preservation that enabled him to spread to habitats of 

 every kind. Finally, we may note here, that so important 

 did the family appear as the primary unit of social life and 

 racial reproduction that man very early surrounded it with 

 the most inviolate mandates of his highly variable moral 

 codes. 



But man's natural defenselessness has affected his social 

 evolution in another profound manner. It was an essential 

 condition of his gregarious habit. There is obviously some 

 question whether man has a truly gregarious instinct. 

 Moreover, the easy explanation of human behavior as due 

 to this or that instinct is distinctly less popular to-day 

 than it was even a decade or two ago. Still further, it is 

 not quite certain that man began the group habit of living 

 in consequence of an instinctive tendency rather than as a 

 result of an intellectual perception of its utility. It seems 

 probable that in many habitats the individual family, 

 or even the solitary person, could have managed to exist 

 without the advantages of group cooperation (especially 

 after the acquisition of crude weapons, if we may suppose 

 such to have been possible in the absence of associated 

 life); but that would have been a precarious and ill- 

 adapted mode of life. Not only from the standpoint of food 

 getting, but also from that of reproduction, life in a horde 

 would have been superior to seclusion. I think we are 

 warranted in holding at least that man acquired an instinc- 

 tive predisposition toward the acquisition of gregarious 

 habits. 



Such gregariousness as man developed, however, was not 

 that of the bovine herd. Religion has long and often urged 

 man to submission and humility, but has seemed to succeed 

 only with the weaker members of the species. In order to 



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