382 MIND IN EVOLUTION CHAP. 



surrender, and mutual service which arise with the dawning 

 consciousness of a common human nature." l 



7. Ordinary unreflecting morality is in line both with 

 lower and higher developments in its ultimate basis. The 

 common character and interests of the species, its unity 

 for certain purposes, go to determine the instincts, and 

 later, the sympathies and antipathies of animals ; in human 

 thought they become, within certain limits to be insisted 

 on presently, explicitly realised. Our social morality rests 

 on our knowledge that others are made of like clay to 

 ourselves. But what the average man knows of others is 

 that while for some purposes or in some relations he may 

 rely on their help, for other purposes he must also be 

 prepared to maintain himself against them. Now within 

 a society, as order develops, the average man comes to 

 conform himself well enough to the customs, laws, and 

 understandings which establish a certain compromise 

 between his self-assertion and his regard for his neighbour. 

 He recognises, to use our former expression, the rules of 

 the game. But outside the organised society, all men are 

 primitively enemies, and here, at least, it is astonishing 

 how primitive we still are. The result of social morality 

 in its lower stages is to organise men into competing 

 groups. Nowhere, as we all know, is the paradox of the 

 moral consciousness more conspicuous than in the contrast 

 between the relations upon which it insists within a well 

 ordered society, and those which it tolerates or encourages 

 towards the foreigner. Dr. Wallace gives an idyllic 

 account of the Dyaks of Borneo, who appear to be the 

 most charming and orderly of people only they have an 

 unfortunate habit of head-hunting. The heads, of course, 

 are only taken from the inhabitants of other villages. 

 Here, surely, is the human moral consciousness in a nut 

 shell. All the great work of social reorganisation that 

 constitutes the progress of 100 years has gone to make 

 the states of Europe more determined adversaries in a 

 more deadly struggle. 



For the natural man, rights and obligations effectively 



1 From the writer's "Ethical Basis of Collectivism," International 

 Journal of Ethics, Jan. 1898, pp. 151, 152. 



