Elementary Morality 49 



as seen in the family relations of those who were reared 

 here last season and who now reluctantly are made to 

 find their separate, but nearby places, and as seen in the 

 clan relations of those who only slightly know one another, 

 and who will collect their new families and migrate together. 

 This conduct is moral in the best sense of the word, except 

 only for self-knowledge. Yet we see still persisting in it 

 the primitive altitude of self-defence against externals. Here 

 is a life of peace, yet the fight is ever ready. Here self is 

 lost sight of in duty and affection, yet remembered in an 

 instant with a narrower or wider significance, including one 

 or two or perhaps a dozen individuals, when externals 

 become hostile. Is it not clear that this conduct is of the 

 same nature as human conduct ; and that the latter is higher 

 only by the superposition of laws one upon another, the 

 complex on the simple, the advanced upon the rearmost. 

 The swallows' conduct differs from that of lower life, by 

 added law, and not by any reversal or extinction of laws 

 or of the principles of law. 



Compare the conduct under like circumstances of a human 

 being. Grant that his intellect is not only more advanced 

 in capacity, but comprehends mental processes different in 

 nature from those of the swallow, notably that conscious 

 contemplation of his own existence and of his mind and 

 workings; and a foreknowledge by inference, from observa- 

 tion of conduct and of some of its consequences. But in all 

 this is it not true that the causes and motive which prompt 

 the swallow also prompt the man, that they produce in him 

 effects and action similar in nature, although affected by 

 new conditions? This is exactly the same need of, and 



