4 PEIIfCE KEOPOTKIN AKNIYERSAEY ADDRESS : 



in its metaphorical sense " than in its direct sense ; and in his 

 second great work, ' The Descent of Man,' he developed his 

 ideas so as to show that mutual aid and mutual support amongst 

 animals are the most important factors for the development of 

 moral sentiments and for the maintenance of the species, 

 especially of the human species. In that work he said that 

 "those species which contain the greatest number of mutually 

 sympathetic individuals have the greatest chance of surviving and 

 of leaving progeny." And he attributed to life in societies such 

 an importance that man, he said, could not have been derived from 

 any species which lived an isolated life, like the orang-outang or 

 the gorilla, but, on the contrary, that he must have taken his 

 origin from some sociable species like the chimpanzee, for sociability 

 was the greatest factor in the survival and progress of his species, 

 Nevertheless, these ideas have been utterly neglected, and Darwin's 

 followers continue to attribute to struggle within the species 

 the chief importance as a factor of evolution. In the year 1887, 

 Huxley, who had long been the most popular exponent of Darwin's 

 views, even came forward with an article about mutual struggle, in 

 which he said that J^ature was nothing but a gladiator-show where 

 everything was red in blood — "Nature red in tooth and claw," 

 as Tennyson has expressed it ; and that in Nature the pitiless 

 extermination of everyone — the pitiless self-assertion of the 

 individual — is the guiding principle ; so that fi'om Nature we 

 can learn no moral lesson because she is essentially immoral. 



This is what has led me to come forward and ask whether 

 it is true that this is the lesson of Nature. A Russian Professor 

 of Zoology, Kessler, a man of much experience, who has travelled 

 a great deal in Europe and Asia, delivered a lecture some time ago 

 in which he pointed out that besides the law of struggle there was 

 the law of mutual aid, which was much more important for the 

 progressive evolution of the species than the law of mutual struggle. 

 It will, I am sure, be found that Professor Kessler's idea is more 

 in. accordance with Nature, as it is in reality, than the idea 

 at which Professor Huxley arrived from the latest studies of his 

 life. If the opinion of those who have studied Nature in the 

 forest and the jungle, more than in the laboratory, be taken, 

 I am sure it will be found that the majority will take this view 

 of Nature. If it be endeavoured to appreciate statistically which 

 is the more important — mutual struggle or mutual aid — no result, 

 of coui'se, can be arrived at. The question can only be put in this 

 way : " Which is the more important for the preservation and 



