24 THE SOCIAL LIFE OF ANIMALS 



field as elsewhere the long sterile period when Greek 

 philosophy, if known, was dogmatically accepted, 

 and shared with other authoritarian systems the re- 

 sponsibility of explaining the world of reality as well 

 as the universe of fancy. 



It was not until my own experiments and think- 

 ing and reading had begun to form in my mind a 

 fairly definite pattern that, by the aid of Havelock 

 Ellis's The Dance of Life (43) I stumbled upon the 

 ideas of the third Earl of Shaftesbury, who lived be- 

 fore and after 1700. He seems to have been the first 

 intellectual in the modern period to recognize fairly 

 clearly that nature presents a racial impulse that has 

 regard for others, as well as a drive for individual 

 self-preservation; that, in fact, there are racial drives 

 that go beyond personal advantage, and can only be 

 explained by their advantage to the group. 



An unfriendly contemporary wrote pretty much 

 these words: "Shaftesbury seems to require and ex- 

 pect goodness in his species as we do a sweet taste in 

 grapes and China oranges, of which, if any are sour, 

 we boldly proclaim that they are not come to their 

 accustomed perfection." Havelock Ellis, in reviewing 

 this development, says that "therewith 'goodness* 

 was seen practically for the first time in the modern 

 period to be as 'natural' as the sweetness of ripe 

 fruit." It is only fair to record that in the religious 



