Man And His Ancestor: A Study In Evolution

by Charles Morris

When this phase of evolution is reached, we cease for the first time to deal with species and genera in the mass and begin to deal with individuals, who now emerge from the general group and stand above and apart like great signal posts on the highway of progress. These heroes are not alone those of the sword. They are the leaders in art, in literature, in science, in thought, in every domain; the men who stand, above, supreme and shining, and toward whose elevation the whole mass below surges slowly but strenuously upward. The third phase of human evolution, therefore, is that of the emergence of the individual as the leader, lawgiver, teacher of mankind, each leader forming a goal for the emulation of all below. And this condition is the legitimate outcome of war, which, terrible as it always has been, was the only agency that could rapidly break up the stagnancy of early communism and send man upward in a swirl toward the heights of civilization.

To give the history of this phase of evolution would be to give the history of mankind, and would be aside from the purpose of this work. All that need be attempted, in support of our argument, is to present some general deductions from human history, indicating the leading features of the service man has received from war.

Conflict between man and man was at first vague and inconsequential. It was only after settled and organized communities, based originally on the family relation, and held together by the possession of property in common, had been formed, that war became more effective in its results. The chief of these results, in the early days, were two: the breaking up of the old equality of power and possession, and the development of larger and more powerful communities. The head man of the village community, or the herding clan, possessed some delegated authority but no political supremacy over his fellows. Equality existed alike in theory and in fact. Battle between neighboring clans was the first step toward breaking this up. The conquered clan became subordinated to the victorious one, and the chief of the victors, as the representative of his clan, exercised an authority over the subject community which he did not possess at home. The degree of subordination differed from the mild form of tribute-paying to that of personal slavery. But in either case we see the old condition of equality vanishing, and that of class distinctions and the relation of superior and inferior arising, while the power of the chief advances from a delegated authority to an established supremacy.

The second outcome of this early phase of war was an increase in the size of political groups. The conquered were forced to aid the conquerors in war as in peace; clans combined to resist aggression; minor communities grew into organized tribes; tribes developed into nations as a result of warlike operations. This growth in political organization was a necessary and inevitable result of continued warfare. The aggressors gathered all the strength possible. The assailed peoples did the same. Temporary alliances grew into permanent ones. Larger armies were formed, larger communities were organized, national development advanced at a rate tenfold, probably a hundredfold, more rapidly than it would have done had peaceful conditions persisted.

Side by side with tribal and national consolidation went on the growth in leadership. The head man became a war chief, the war chief a king. Success made him a hero to his people. He grew to be the lord of conquered tribes; into his hands fell the bulk of the spoils; the relation of equality of possessions vanished as the plunder taken by the army was distributed unequally among the victors. Below the principal leader came his ablest followers, each claiming and receiving a proportionate share in the new division of power and wealth. In short, when the era of war had become fully inaugurated, the old social and political relations of mankind were broken up with great rapidity; equality of power was replaced by inequality, which steadily grew more and more declared; equality of wealth in like manner vanished; in all directions the individual emerged from the mass, class distinctions became intricate, and the relations of rich and poor, of king, noble, citizen, and slave, completely replaced the old communal organization of mankind.

War was the great agent in this evolution. It might have emerged slowly in peace; it came with almost startling rapidity in war, and reached a degree of power on the one hand and subordination on the other that could scarcely ever have appeared had conditions of peace prevailed. With this growth of great nations came a rapid development in political science, in legal institutions, in social relations. An enormous advance was made, in a limited period, in the civilization of mankind; as a result, not of the devastation and slaughter of war, but of its influence upon human organization.

It was the principle of reward for ability to which the leaders of men owed their supremacy. When nations were organized this same principle took another and very useful form. The distribution of wealth had become strikingly unequal. There were endless grades of distinction between the supremely wealthy and the absolutely poor. The wealthy were ready to lavish their money in return for articles of pleasure and luxury. The poor, in their thirst for a share of wealth, were strongly stimulated to inventive activity in producing new and desirable wares. Inequality became the mainspring of business activity; thought and inventive ingenuity were strongly exercised; a rapid progress went on in the production of new devices, new methods, and new articles of necessity and luxury; manufacture flourished, commerce increased, civilization appeared, the whole as a legitimate outcome of the conditions brought about by war.

This phase of human evolution, as may be seen, was radically different from that already considered, arising from the development of sacerdotal influence and priestly power. They worked together, no doubt. The establishment of the great primitive empires, as a peaceful process, was greatly complicated by war, which tended steadily to increase the temporal power of the ruler and enable him in time to control by the sword alone. But it is interesting to find that long after the old system was practically overthrown its shadow still lay upon the nations. The powerful war monarchs of Assyria led their armies to conquest in the name of the national deity, whose vicegerents they claimed to be. The autocratic emperors of Rome went so far as to claim in some cases to be gods themselves. Even in modern Russia some of this dignity pertains to the emperor, as the supreme head of the national church. Old ideas are proverbially hard to kill.

But the mission of the priesthood by no means stopped here. The priests rose to influence as the teachers as well as the leaders of the people. The members of this class, set aside from manual occupations, and devoted to thought upon the relations of man to the divine, played an important part in the development of the human mind. As a result of their speculative activity of thought the old religious systems sank into the background; the simple worship of primitive times was overshadowed by intricate mythological systems, splendid in worship and creed; cosmogonies and philosophies were devised; and human thought, once fairly set loose in this field, went on with great energy and imaginative fervor.

Literature arose as a result of this activity of thought. It took at first the form of hymns, speculative essays, magical formulas, dogmas, ordinances of worship, etc. By degrees it grew more secular in form, until in the end secular literature arose. This was greatly stimulated by the conditions of inequality arising from war. In the same manner as the reward for merit in invention stimulated men to activity in the mechanical arts, so the hope of reward for literary production stirred up men to the composing of poems, histories, and other works of thought. In both directions, physical and mental, men were stimulated to the most active exertions by the conditions of inequality in wealth and power, and the consequent desire to obtain a share of the money lavished by the rich and the authority similarly lavished by the powerful.