The Pretended Antiquity of War 169 



by reason than are the lowest savages at the present 

 time.* 



At the very earliest, then, war could not have 

 taken place until a comparatively high degree 

 of intelligence had been developed, which enabled 

 man to overcome this strong hereditary instinct. 

 When men massacre each other, it is said that 

 they act like animals. This is a profound error; 

 it is when men do not massacre each other that 

 they act like animals. This fallacy is a part of 

 the error which confuses struggle with combat be- 

 tween members of the same species. Lions struggle 

 every day with antelopes, but they do not fight 

 with other lions. Man struggles every day as 

 the lion does, that is to say against the animals 

 and the plants. Every head of cattle killed in a 

 slaughter house is a part of this struggle. But if 

 man had acted as animals do with regard to his 

 own species, the federation of the human race 



' The Descent of Man, p. 62. It is interesting to find Darwin 

 quoting on the same page and with apparent approval the 

 following comment on this passage by a writer in the Spectator: 



"Mr. Darwin finds himself compelled to reintroduce a new 

 doctrine of the fall of man. He shows that the instincts of the 

 higher animals are far nobler than the habits of savage races 

 of men, and he finds himself, therefore, compelled to reintroduce 

 — in a form of the substantial orthodoxy of which he appears to 

 be quite unconscious — and to introduce as a scientific hypothesis 

 the doctrine that man's gain of knowledge was the cause of a 

 temporary but long enduring moral deterioration. . . . What does 

 the Jewish tradition of the moral degeneration of man through 

 his snatching at a knowledge forbidden him by his highest instinct 

 assert beyond this?" 



