64 PROLEGOMENA 



organism. However much men may differ in the quality 

 of their intellects, the intensity of their passions, and the 

 delicacy of their sensations, it cannot be said that one is 

 fitted by his organization to be an agricultural labourer 

 and nothing else, and another to be a landowner and 

 nothing else. Moreover, with all their enormous differ- 

 ences in natural endowment, men agree in one thing, 

 and that is their innate desire to enjoy the pleasures 

 and to escape the pains of life; and, in short, to do 

 nothing but that which it pleases them to do, without 

 the least reference to the welfare of the society into which 

 they are born. That is their inheritance (the reality at 

 the bottom of the doctrine of original sin) from the 

 long series of ancestors, human and semi-human and 

 brutal, in whom the strength of this innate tendency to 

 self-assertion was the condition of victory in the struggle 

 for existence. That is the reason of the aviditas vitoe^ 

 the insatiable hunger for enjoyment of all man- 

 kind, which is one of the essential conditions of success 

 in the war with the state of nature outside; and yet the 

 sure agent of the destruction of society if allowed free 

 play within. 



The check upon this free play of self-assertion, or 

 natural liberty, which is the necessary condition for the 

 origin of human society, is the product of organic neces- 

 sities of a different kind from those upon which the 

 constitution of the hive depends. One of these is the 

 mutual affection of parent and offspring, intensified by 

 the long infancy of the human species. But the most 

 important is the tendency, so strongly developed in man, 

 to reproduce in himself actions and feelings similar to, 

 or correlated with, those of other men. Man is the most 

 consummate of all mimics in the animal world; none but 



17 'Thirst' or 'craving desire' for life." Note 7 to Evolution 

 and Ethics, Collected Essays, IX 196. 



