86 THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE 



from nature. It is the more desirable, and even necessary, 

 to make this distinction, since society differs from nature 

 in having a definite moral object; whence it comes about 

 that the course shaped by the ethical man the member 

 of society or citizen necessarily runs counter to that 

 which the non-ethical man the primitive savage, or 

 man as a mere member of the animal kingdom tends 

 to adopt. The latter fights out the struggle for exist- 

 ence to the bitter end, like any other animal ; the former 

 devotes his best energies to the object of setting limits to 

 the struggle. 6 



In the cycle of phenomena presented by the life of 

 man, the animal, no more moral end is discernible than 

 in that presented by the lives of the wolf and of the deer. 

 However imperfect the relics of prehistoric men may be, 

 the evidence which they afford clearly tends to the con- 

 clusion that, for thousands and thousands of years, be- 

 fore the origin of the oldest known civilizations, men 

 were savages of a very low type. They strove with their 

 enemies and their competitors; they preyed upon things 

 weaker or less cunning than themselves; they were born, 

 multiplied without stint, and died, for thousands of gen- 

 erations alongside the mammoth, the urus, the lion, and 

 the hyaena, whose lives were spent in the same way; and 

 they were no more to be praised or blamed, on moral 

 grounds, than their less erect and more hairy compatriots. 



As among these, so among primitive men, the weakest 

 and stupidest went to the wall, while the toughest and 

 shrewdest, those who were best fitted to cope with their 

 circumstances, but not the best in any other sense, sur- 

 vived. Life was a continual free fight, and beyond the 

 limited and temporary relations of the family, the Hob- 



6 [The reader will observe that this is the argument of the Ro 

 manes Lecture, in brief. 1894. T. H. H.] 

 Evolution and Ethics was the second Romanes Lecture. 



