31 8 Mutual Aid as a Law of Nature 



The naturalists represent the earth to us as an im- 

 mense battle-field on which all living beings struggle 

 violently against each other, producing a frightful 

 competition. Reacting against such an assertion, 

 Kropotkin has fallen into the opposite error, in wish- 

 ing to make us believe that mutual aid is the law 

 which rules the relations of organisms. Mutual aid 

 is a reality, but far from existing among all living 

 beings, it is solely an appendage of a very small 

 number of animals which have a complicated psy- 

 chology, such as birds and the mammals, and it is also 

 the common law of all the animal societies, in which 

 progress is always accompanied by an evolution 

 of solidarity/ 



The law of mutual aid is certainly more than 

 "the appendage of a very small number of ani- 

 mals." It is a universal fact in nature and is 

 common to all living beings which are composed 

 of more than one cell — all the metazoas. Neither 

 struggle nor mutual aid is "the law which rules 

 the relations of organisms." It is both struggle 

 and mutual aid, each in proportion as it contributes 

 to the increase of vital intensity. Certainly the 

 picture of Nature which the naturalists present to 

 us is not an idyll. A world in which millions of 

 beings can only live as the result of the destruction 

 of millions of beings of other species is certainly 

 not the ideal world which our humanitarian im- 

 pulses would lead us to construct if we had the 



» Lemeere, Discourse at the opening of the Free University 

 of Brussels, 1907, Oct. 14. 



