SCIENCE AS A RULE OF LIFE 17 



matter, and his conclusions are of the greatest 

 interest. 1 



" My own theory about the peasant, as I know 

 him, and about people of lowly culture in general 

 so far as I have learnt to know about them, is 

 that the ethics of amity belong to their natural 

 and normal mood, whereas the ethics of enmity, 

 being but ' as the shadow of a passing fear,' are 

 relatively accidental. Thus to the thesis that 

 human charity is a by-product, I retort squarely 

 with the counter-thesis that human hatred is a 

 by-product. The brute that lurks in our common 

 human nature will break bounds sometimes ; but 

 I believe that whenever man, be he savage or 

 civilised, is at home to himself, his pleasure and 

 pride is to play the good neighbour. It may be 

 urged by way of objection that I overestimate the 

 amenities, whether economic or ethical, of the 

 primitive state ; that a hard life is bound to 

 produce a hard man. I am afraid that the 

 psychological necessity of the alleged correlation 

 is by no means evident to me. Surely the hard- 

 working individual can find plenty of scope for 

 his energies without needing, let us say, to beat 

 his wife. Nor are the hard-working peoples of 

 the earth especially notorious for their in- 

 humanity. Thus the Eskimo, whose life is one 

 long fight against the cold, has the warmest of 

 hearts. Mr. Stefanson says of his newly discovered 

 4 Blonde Eskimo,' a people still living in the stone 

 age : ' They are the equals of the best of our own 

 1 Op. tit., pp. 21-27. 



