EGOISM AND ALTRUISM 249 



animal development is to shut one's eyes to one of 

 the most obvious and overwhelming facts of organic 

 evolution. Individualism antedates mutualism, 

 both among the one-celled forms and among the 

 many-celled metazoa. Cooperation everywhere is 

 the sequence of a long preliminary of individual 

 contention. And cooperation does not mean 

 cessation of struggle, either among those co- 

 operating or among the groups themselves, as 

 Kropotkin and other exaggerators of the mutual 

 aid factor seem to assume. It usually does little 

 more than transfer the struggle from individuals 

 to groups. When a lot of pelicans or wolves get 

 together and work together in order that they may 

 thereby the better defend themselves or slay others, 

 it is hard to see how such facts can be placed to 

 the credit of cooperation any more than to that 

 of competition. Then, too, excepting in a few 

 societies of insects, cooperation has not gone so 

 far as to do more than slightly alleviate the 

 competition even among the members of a co- 

 operating group. Competition is a much more 

 common and influential fact in the phenomena of 

 life than cooperation, for it involves a large part 

 of the activity of individual life, and is also promi- 

 nent in all social activities. 



The preponderance of egoism in the natures of 

 living beings is the most mournful and immense 

 fact in the phenomena of conscious life. It has 

 made the world the kind of world it would have 

 been had the gods actually emptied their wrath 

 vials upon it. Brotherhood is anomalous, and, 



