358 Heredity. 



chus have succeeded, under the influence of laws and of heredity, 

 in losing the nomad instincts of their races, and in adopting the 

 civilization of the peoples they conquered. Others, the Mongols 

 for instance, have shown themselves incapable of this, after their 

 hour of glory under Gengis Khan and Tamerlane. 



Nations destined for social life have early possessed the art of 

 agriculture, together with all that it implies : division of property, 

 agricultural arts and implements, and care for the future. Here 

 would begin the really difficult and delicate part of our task, and 

 this, for lack of a scientific genesis of moral ideas, we cannot 

 attempt. It would be requisite to show how each progressive step 

 of civilization presupposes new conditions of existence ; how to 

 those very simple conditions of existence which, as we have said, 

 are the groundwork of morals, succeed conditions of existence 

 more and more complex, which have rendered possible every fresh 

 stage in civilization. Then we should have to show the part 

 played by heredity in the adaptation of successive generations to 

 these new conditions. But we can here merely observe that, the 

 primitive state of mankind being characterized by a lawless indi- 

 vidualism, the development of sympathetic tendencies those called 

 'altruistic' by the positivist school becomes more and more 

 necessary in proportion as civilization increases. These tendencies 

 certainly exist, whatever may have been said of them by those who 

 would reduce all our acts to egoism. They are natural, as is 

 proved by psychological analysis. The attempt has even been 

 ingeniously made to demonstrate this physically, by showing that 

 in the lowest grade of the biological scale, where the sexes are not 

 distinct, the individual is restricted to egoistic tendencies alone ; 

 whereas, so soon as the difference of sex appears, it necessarily 

 brings with itself tendencies of a different nature, which go beyond 

 the individual. These gross sympathetic instincts of the lower 

 organisms are developed in proportion with the growth of intelli- 

 gence. 



There is no doubt that there exist in man natural sympathetic 

 tendencies, which are the germs of those ulterior complex senti- 

 ments which we call patriotism, philanthropy, devotion to a society 

 or an idea. From what has been said in the preceding chapter as 

 to the genesis of these complex ideas and sentiments, we can form 



