No Wars among Apes 73 



environment to our needs. And in part the 

 contradiction is due to a striking conflict between 

 the social instincts and the growing intelligence 

 of man. 



Among the anthropomorphic apes there is 

 nothing which resembles our wars of conquest and 

 our armed peace. This is because the apes, pos- 

 sessing a very low order of intelligence, have not 

 been able to create organizations so vast and 

 perfect as ours. The association of apes has not 

 passed the purely rudimentary phase of wandering 

 troupes, while human association has arrived at 

 the phase of the state, of nationality, and even of 

 the group of civilizations. It is only because of his 

 increased intelligence, therefore, that man has 

 been able to wage wars of conquest and to establish 

 the perpetual state of latent war called armed 

 peace, between individuals of the same species. 



If we ask why wolves do not eat each other, 

 the answer is that if wolves were constantly 

 attacking their own kind in order to devour them, 

 the wolf species would have ceased to exist long 

 ago. We do not know how instincts are trans- 

 mitted by heredity, but we do know that hereditary 

 instincts exist. When man developed from earlier 

 forms he possessed necessarily the hereditary in- 

 stinct which is the common law of the animal 

 kingdom, and which prevented him from attacking 

 his own kind. This instinct is found not only 

 among the herbivorous and frugivorous animals, 

 which cannot eat each other, but even among the 



