148 The Morality of Nature 



The early response of such human beings (when it is un- 

 conscious) must evidently be based upon inherited impulses 

 since the same conditions visibly permit different responses, 

 and since the lack of conscious selection of reasoning, which 

 is so noticeable in the activities of primitive men, shuts out 

 any appreciating consideration of the future. When we see 

 savages of one tribe respecting one another, so as to permit 

 the cultivation of land, and the production of destructible 

 crops and stock, while another tribe in the same continent 

 procures these properties only by raids, and holds them only 

 by force, while their environment is practically the same, 

 then we must attribute their respective ways of life to in- 

 stinctive impulse, which can only be so persistent in them by 

 reason of heredity. This control is equally indicated for the 

 harmonizing impulse, and for the aggressive. The search 

 for the beginning of these opposing impulses carries us back 

 from man to animal life, and in that to lowest forms, below 

 any possible intellectual origin, and equally clearly below any 

 religious inspiration. Down in the most elementary rela- 

 tions of simplest life we find harmony without aggression 

 and learn that this high virtue is not to be found as a 

 product of humanity or as an invention of humanity's new- 

 found wisdom. It is only the appreciation of it which is 

 new and distinctly human, and able to place it with affinity 

 to the divine aspiration. The co-operative motive has its 

 roots in the lowest problems of life. It does not matter 

 whether this lowliness is observed in the life today raising 

 from genesis, or the life recorded for our reading by which 

 our own development was reached. It was and is the same 

 for both. Although the world is changed by the higher 



