54 SYMBIOSIS 



The pleasures and pains directly resulting in experience from sym- 

 pathetic and unsympathetic actions have first to be slowly associated 

 with such actions, and the resulting incentives and deterrents frequently 

 obeyed, before there could arise the perceptions that sympathetic and 

 unsympathetic actions are remotely beneficial or detrimental to the actor ; 

 and they had to be obeyed still longer and more generally before there 

 could arise the perceptions that they are socially beneficial or detrimental. 



So far then from regarding the respective recognitions of 

 utility as preceding and causing the moral sentiment, he regards 

 the moral sentiments as growing up pari passu with the social 

 and anti-social acts, and so as preceding actual intellectual 

 recognitions of utility. This precedence of the moral sentiments 

 is quite in keeping with the view of their origin as here presented, 

 namely, as dating back to primordial economic developments, 

 the economic and bio-economic problem demanding, of organic 

 necessity, primitive forms of morality or quasi-morality. Again 

 I would ask what other principle of organic relations could 

 well have embodied these requisites of gradual, systematic and 

 abiding experience in such ideal perfection as the symbiotic 

 principle ? What other principle could have supplied the 

 requisite physiological groundwork for the evolution of sympathy ? 

 Where else in the world of life do we find the requisite " obedi- 

 ence " to the laws of protracted association so aptly illustrated 

 as in the integrity of the symbiotic relation however unconscious 

 the co-operation involved ? 



I know well that some writers have spoken of the necessity 

 of early service " involuntary service " supposed to have 

 gradually led on to voluntary aid. Such service, however, is 

 alleged to have consisted chiefly in sacrifice of life to carnivorous 

 appetites, which are considered " natural " and as justifying the 

 habitual infliction of pain. Prof. Hervey Woodburn Shimer* 

 quite recently put forward such a theory. He contends that 

 service was at first compulsory in the vast majority of plants 

 and animals the grossest form of such compulsory service 

 consisting in one organism being forced to yield its body for the 

 nourishment of another : "All animals and many vegetable 

 forms are dependent upon the death of other organisms for the 

 prolongation of their own Hie." " Animals can live only through 

 the death of other animals or plants." How light-heartedly 

 such defamations of Nature are pronounced ! Yet, overwhelming 

 evidence goes to show that the rule of life consists in cross-feeding 



* Scientific Monthly, August, 1916. 



