60 THE CREED OF SCIENCE, RELIGIOUS AND MORAL. 



the ant, or any other ; and to this fact of his nature, 

 more than even to the special excellences of his hand 

 and head, is to be attributed his great and successful 

 career, and his completely outstripping all competing 

 species in the struggle for existence. For without the 

 social union, his other advantages would have been of 

 little service ; without it, indeed, they would have been 

 but little developed ; but by the social union, which 

 makes division of labour possible, inventions and im- 

 provements are made, science and art become possible, 

 and language, itself a necessary pre-requisite of society, 

 becomes further perfected from the exigency of further 

 social needs. 



Man is a social animal, partly because his immediate 

 animal progenitors were such in some low degree, but 

 more because he speedily learned by painful experience 

 the absolute necessity of union, for life itself on the one 

 hand, and on the other, the great and ever-increasing 

 advantages resulting from the union itself. Moreover, 

 he found his pleasure as well as his profit in social life, 

 being naturally of a sociable disposition, in spite of 

 Hobbes's saying to the contrary. From being a social 

 animal, man at length advanced till he became a moral 

 being ; that is, a being that not only seeks, as every 

 individual created thing must seek, the conservation of 

 its own existence, but which also, in order that others 

 may be free to do the same and in order that society 

 with its great advantages may be possible for all, mani- 

 fests a regard for the rights of others as well as his own, 

 and recognizes the necessity of obeying rules framed in 

 the interest of all, rules which limit the naturally 

 excessive egoism of each to the fair amount which is 

 compatible with that of all the rest. And man became a 

 moral being all the sooner and more easily because he 



