MAN VARYING FROM ANIMALS
Effect of the absence of a special pairing season on nascent man.—Consequent state of ceaseless war between sire and young males.—Man already more than an ape.—Results of his prolonged infancy and of maternal love.—A young male permitted to live in the parent group.—Conditions in which this novelty arose.
In common, then, with their nearest congeners of to-day, we have found each male head of a group of our anthropoid ancestors in direct antagonism with every other male, and a consequent disruption of the family at each encounter with a superior force. This disruption, in its effects on a species of non-gregarious habits, would result not only in the dispersal of its members, but in the destruction of what material progress in the accumulation of property might have accrued. As this would have included all germs of mechanical discovery, again doubtless due solely to the superior constructive faculties of the male, it is evident that advance in a race thus socially constituted was quite impossible.
Now this antagonism of male with male, with all its retrograde consequences, a struggle fierce enough in all animals, had a more intense effect on nascent man than on any other creature that had ever existed. An added force was caused by the disappearance in the nascent human species of that season of physical and mental repose, granted by Nature to the rest of creation, when not actually in the moment or season of rut. This ever-recurring but limited period, ordinarily appearing for a certain fixed epoch in each year, by the exigencies of supply and demand in the necessarily abundant food required for nursing mothers, had lost its date-fixing power with this new creation—Man. With the very first steps in progress would come his adaptation to a more or less omnivorous and consequently more regular diet. The consequent modification would be profound in the matter of sexual habit and appetite. Man needed no longer to put limits to the season of love and desire.[1] This was a crime against Nature, new in the history of the world, a crime which Nature would probably have avenged by race-deterioration or extermination, if the germs of mental power had not been already strong enough to lift him, Man, to be, of all creatures, almost completely beyond the influence of environment, thence of Nature herself.
The intensity of the evil led to its cure. In a state of society where literally every male creature's hand was against the other, and life one continual uproar from their contending strife; where not only was there no instant's truce in the war-fare, but each blow dealt was emphasised (fatally) by the intellectual finesse which now directed it, it became a question of forced advance in progress or straight retreat in annihilation as a species. However difficult it may be to imagine by what path such a creature was ever to emerge from the materialistic labyrinth in which we thus find him involved, it is sure that he neither could nor did remain there. A forward step was somehow taken, some road out of the maze was somehow found.
It remains for us to trace, by what dim light of custom and tradition we may, the faint trail of those momentous footprints, which, however lame and halting, took the strait and difficult way to a higher life. We may expect to find, as is but natural, that the path was one before untrodden. As man followed it, at first unconsciously, from the shoulders of this new pilgrim, predestined to worthier burdens, would fall some of the heavy load of the mere animal nature.
There was now, in fact, to be a break in the economy of animal nature, as regards that vicious circle, where we found an ever-recurring violent succession to the solitary paternal tyrant, by sons whose parricidal hands were so soon again clenched in fratricidal strife. In the dawn of peace between this father and son we shall find the signpost to the new highway.
Before going further, we may here state our assumption that, when our ancestor had arrived at this crisis in his life, a crisis involving the vast psychological step in advance implied in the development of society, and the intelligence necessary for the evolution of the law in its regulation, he was already somewhat more than ape. The animal stage as forming part of the ladder of ascent from brute to man would be marked by degrees of progression, each a step further removed from the original type. These very earliest steps we indeed propose to examine later in detail, for the present we will suppose they have been taken, and that the influence of environment, under certain hypothetic conditions, to be also detailed hereafter, has fostered physical modifications towards the human type such as we found in the matter of rut. But in nature the relation is very close between the physical and the mental qualities. The advance in one would possibly lead to a corresponding development of the other. Each is the necessary complement of each. For instance, as Mr. Darwin has pointed out, while the lower extremities become more and more used for progression alone, so the upper, thus left free, would be specialised as prehensile organs, so becoming both valet and tutor to the nascent brain. To push our metaphor to an extreme, we may say that when Homo Alalus trod the new path, it was already as a biped in an upright attitude, thus leaving at least his hand free to point it out to others, for as yet his tongue, at least by the hypothesis, was inarticulate.
Our line of research as regards the new departure was at once narrowed when we indicated that it ended in the peaceful conjunction of father and son. Our path will lie in the examination of the question as to what possible series of natural circumstances, in the domestic life of the race, could lead to such conjunction, and what law in such an age could suffice for regulation of such association if formed. We shall have to examine more closely (as far as our imagination will aid us) the exact conditions of the family life of the semi-human group which we have supposed typical in that era, i.e. the small isolated band of anthropoids, composed of a single polygamous adult male with dependent wives and offspring. His possible relations with these, especially his attitude towards his male children, will interest us. Therein should certainly be found the desired series of circumstances entailing a critical situation, whose happy resolution shall furnish the clue to the problem of that possible aggregation on which all future progress depends. However strange it may appear, it will be found, as we have already said, that the abnormal conditions imposed by the unnatural modifications of the sexual functions have served as a means to the end of advance in progress. And as, by their action in the past, anthropoid man had become the most sexually jealous and intractable of all creatures, so it may be expected that the series of causes which shall have for effect the restraint of such excess of passion, will possess further vast potentiality of action. Such latency in potentiality is evidently indispensable when we consider that there is here concerned the evolution of law in opposition to nature, and its triumph for all time over the mere brute.