It is an old truth that children’s love of their parents is generally much weaker than the parents’ love of their children. The latter is absolutely necessary for the subsistence of the species, the former is not;[27] though, when a richer food-supply favoured the formation of larger communities, filial attachment must have been of advantage to the race.[28] No individual is born with filial love. However, Aristotle goes too far when saying that, whilst parents love their children from their birth upward, “children do not begin to love their parents until they are of a considerable age, and have got full possession of their wits and faculties.”[29] Under normal circumstances the infant from an early age displays some attachment to its parents. Professor Sully tells us of a girl, about seventeen months old, who received her father after a few days absence with special marks of affection, “rushing up to him, smoothing and stroking his face and giving him all the toys in the room.”[30] Filial love is retributive; the agreeable feeling produced by benefits received makes the individual look with pleasure and kindliness upon the giver. And here again the affection is strengthened by close living together, as appears from the cooling effect of long separation of children from their parents. But the filial feeling is not affection pure and simple, it is affection mingled with regard for the physical and mental superiority of the parent.[31] As the parental feeling is partly love of the weak and young, so the filial feeling is partly regard for the strong and (comparatively) old.
[27] This observation was made already by Hutcheson (Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, p. 219) and Adam Smith (Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 199). The latter wrote, a hundred years before the publication of ‘The Origin of Species,’ that parental tenderness is a much stronger affection than filial piety, because “the continuance and propagation of the species depend altogether upon the former, and not upon the latter.”
[28] Darwin maintains (Descent of Man, p. 105) that the filial affections have been to a large extent gained through natural selection.
[29] Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea, viii. 12. 2.
[30] Sully, Studies of Childhood, p. 243.
[31] See supra, [i. 618 sq.]
Besides parental, conjugal, and filial attachment we find among all existing races of men altruism of the fraternal type, binding together children of the same parents, relatives more remotely allied, and, generally, members of the same social unit. But I am inclined to suppose that man was not originally a gregarious animal, in the proper sense of the word, that he originally lived in families rather than in tribes, and that the tribe arose as the result of increasing food-supply, allowing the formation of larger communities, combined with the advantages which under such circumstances accrued from a gregarious life. The man-like apes are not gregarious; and considering that some of them are reported to be encountered in greater numbers in the season when most fruits come to maturity,[32] we may infer that the solitary life generally led by them is due chiefly to the difficulty they experience in getting food at other times of the year. That our earliest human or half-human ancestors lived on the same kind of food, and required about the same quantities of it as the man-like apes, seems to me a fairly legitimate supposition; and from this I conclude that they were probably not more gregarious than these apes. Subsequently man became carnivorous; but even when getting his living by fishing or hunting, he may still have continued as a rule this solitary kind of life, or gregariousness may have become his habit only in part. “An animal of a predatory kind,” Mr. Spencer observes, “which has prey that can be caught and killed without help, profits by living alone: especially if its prey is much scattered, and is secured by stealthy approach or by lying in ambush. Gregariousness would here be a positive disadvantage. Hence the tendency of large carnivores, and also of small carnivores that have feeble and widely-distributed prey, to lead solitary lives.”[33] It is certainly a noteworthy fact that even now there are rude savages who live rather in separate families than in tribes; and that their solitary life is due to want of sufficient food is obvious from several facts which I have stated in full in another place.[34] These facts, as it seems to me, give much support to the supposition that the kind of food man subsisted upon, together with the large quantities of it which he wanted, formed in olden times a hindrance to a true gregarious manner of living, except perhaps in some unusually rich places.
[32] Savage, ‘Observations on the External Characters and Habits of the Troglodytes Niger, in Boston Journal of Natural History, iv. 384. Cf. von Koppenfels, ‘Meine Jagden auf Gorillas,’ in Die Gartenlaube, 1877, p. 419.
[33] Spencer, Principles of Psychology, ii. 558.
[34] Westermarck, op. cit. p. 43 sqq.