[139] "Methods of Ethics," 4th ed. p. 97.
[140] "Biologische Probleme," p. 177 et seq.
CHAPTER V
EGOISM AND ALTRUISM IN EVOLUTION
Carneri, in consistency with his scepticism as to feeling in animals, remarks that, with man, the struggle for happiness is added to the struggle for existence. Wallace and others regard man as comparatively withdrawn from the struggle for existence and the operation of natural selection. Much depends on definition in any statement; but it may be repeated that the analogy of nervous organization does not permit us to suppose the absence of pleasure and pain in many species, and that man is no exception to the rule that the disharmonious is the unstable, and doomed, by its nature, to destruction.
However, analogy does not, as we have seen, carry us far in deciding upon the presence or absence of consciousness, or in determining the exact nature of the ends it posits even where we may suppose it to be present and conscious of ends. If, then, we apply the terms "egoism" and "altruism" to the action of plants or even of other animal species, meaning, by these terms, that, in the action referred to, such ends are sought and willed as render human conduct what we call altruistic, we may be falling into error. However, in considering egoism and altruism in their relations to human development, it may be useful to note their prototypes, as far as external form is concerned, in life on lower planes, without making any assumption as to the internal meaning of these prototypes, except in so far as, in special instances, we may be warranted by further particular examination of facts.
It is evident that the action of animals is of a sort that has as its immediate and most prominent result their own protection and preservation, and that they show themselves generally hostile to other kinds and even, in many cases, if not hostile, at least indifferent, under most circumstances, to their own kind. Yet a certain amount of mutual support may occasionally be observed even among lower species. One of the forms of such aid most common in the whole range of animal species is the care of the parent animal for its offspring. This care is more usual on the part of the female than on that of the male, and where it is exercised it is not the exception, but rather the rule, that the mother will sacrifice life itself in the defence of her young. Such care and self-sacrifice, especially marked in mammals and birds, are too well known to need illustration here.
Mutual aid between the sexes is not so common or so strongly marked as the care of parent animals for their young. There is often no companionship at all between the sexes, and even at the time of mating male and female may show themselves hostile to each other. It often happens with certain Epeiridae the males of whom are smaller than the females, that, after copulation or sometimes even before, the female seizes upon the male and makes a meal of him. Sometimes, also, during the battle of two males for the possession of a female, the latter throws her web about both and devours them.[141] Female deer wandering in the company of a male have been observed to watch with indifference the contest of the latter with some newly arrived male, and on his death to lick the wounds of their new suitor and follow him as they before followed his predecessor. The relations of male and female among the birds, especially among some sorts of birds, have, on the other hand, often been made the theme of the poet.