174 WARFARE IN THE HUMAN BODY 



inheritance of the earth. Thus it does not seem a vain 

 imagination or a mere unsupported hypothesis to consider 

 the early warrior's brain as the type from which all our 

 still unstable new developments have naturally grown. 

 The savage who was most a savage, who was the fiercest, 

 the most ruthless, who was most endowed with cunning, 

 and who yet had a faint sense of loyalty within his brain, 

 which made him capable of being led or leading in his 

 turn, was the true fountain of progress, of knowledge, and 

 ultimately of those finer cortical growths which some 

 metaphysicians and all religionists prefer to call " the 

 soul." We must look to the lowest man-eating tribes 

 who yet remain if we wish to see ourselves somewhat as 

 we were when mankind first rose from the Miocene abyss. 



Though these conclusions are disagreeable to many, 

 while others think that it is straining an hypothesis beyond 

 the limits of elasticity to reach them, it must be remembered 

 that like objections are still urged against conclusions, as 

 to the formation of human individual and racial cerebral 

 characteristics, reached in psycho-analysis. These militate 

 against curious concepts, such as Free Will, which are 

 peculiarly dear to many, while they show that the origin 

 of some of the sublimer feelings lies deep in the savage 

 passions of self-regarding instincts. To attribute every- 

 thing to cannibalism, without complete analysis of the 

 way it operated, would be indeed a strain, but if it can be 

 shown with plausibility that out of the practice of war 

 there sprang, whether on Darwinian grounds purely, 

 or on those which suggest that direct environmental 

 adaptation can be inherited, such higher attributes of man 

 as foresight, caution, subordination, respect for leader- 

 ship, and other's mental endowments, while the whole 

 basis of the organizing tribes substituted reason, which is 



