THE CANNIBAL IN EVOLUTION 175 



the power of balancing possibilities, for purely savage 

 instinctive action, we have a right, not only to conclude 

 that cannibalism was an immense, even the greatest, 

 factor of early evolution, but that we are no more justified 

 in regarding it with peculiar disfavour than if we dis- 

 covered with horror that the singular energy in doing 

 good of some saintly woman had its origin in frustrate, 

 sublimated sexual passion. 



Moreover, if the conclusions arrived at in the chapter 

 on the function of Repair in Evolution have any weight, 

 we are forced to assume that such phenomena as failure 

 and repair leading to favourable variation must occur 

 in the realm of anthropology as well as in pathology and 

 physiology. The more the theory is examined the more 

 universal will be seen its operation, so that at last it seems 

 legitimate to draw the conclusion that physiology in the 

 sense of perfected action and reaction is an ideal of living 

 structure, and no sooner seen that lost, while a morbid 

 or semi-morbid condition due to over-stress and the 

 reactions of repair, is the true norm in evolution. If this is 

 so, and few capable of taking a scientific and philosophical 

 view of society as now seen in the melting-pot of change, 

 disaster, repair, and again disaster and new trials and errors 

 as modifications take place under internal and external 

 stresses and stimuli, will be found to deny it, we may take 

 it for granted that the still vaster modifications of various 

 species of humanity in the ages of geologic time must have 

 exhibited like phenomena on a lower plane, in which the 

 furious self-regarding instincts had not yet been changed, 

 or only partly changed, into some of the higher attributes 

 of man. When in imagination we regard such possible 

 factors at work, the picture seems one of unmitigated 

 misery, or social disease and disorder. Yet even then there 



