MISSING FACTOR IN CURRENT THEORIES 27 



state, Man has been largely indebted to those 

 qualities which he shares with the ape and the 

 tiger." ^ That stage reached, " for thousands and 

 thousands of years, before the origin of the oldest 

 known civilizations, men were savages of a very 

 low type. They strove with their enemies and 

 their competitors ; they preyed upon things weaker 

 or less cunning than themselves ; they were born, 

 multiplied without stint, and died, for thousands of 

 generations, alongside the mammoth, the urus, the 

 lion, and the hyaena, whose lives were spent in the 

 same way ; and they were no more to be praised 

 or blamed, on moral grounds, than their less erect 

 and more hairy compatriots. . . . Life was 

 a continual free fight, and beyond the limited and 

 temporary relations of the family, the Hobbesian 

 war of each against all was the normal state of 

 existence. The human species, like others, plashed 

 and floundered amid the general stream of evolu- 

 tion, keeping its head above water as it best might, 

 and thinking neither of whence nor whither." ^ 



How then does Mr. Huxley act — for it is in- 

 structive to follow out the consequences of an 

 error — in the face of this tremendous problem ? 

 He gives it up. There is no solution. Nature is 



* Evolution and Ethics^ p. 6. 

 ^Nijieteenth Century, Feb., 1888. 



