Mutual Aid | Page 8

dealt with at
some length. A third work dealing with man and written on similar
lines is The Principles of Sociology, by Prof. F.A. Giddings, the first
edition of which was published in 1896 at New York and London, and
the leading ideas of which were sketched by the author in a pamphlet in
1894. I must leave, however, to literary critics the task of discussing the
points of contact, resemblance, or divergence between these works and
mine.
The different chapters of this book were published first in the
Nineteenth Century ("Mutual Aid among Animals," in September and
November 1890; "Mutual Aid among Savages," in April 1891; "Mutual
Aid among the Barbarians," in January 1892; "Mutual Aid in the
Medieval City," in August and September 1894; and "Mutual Aid
amongst Modern Men," in January and June 1896). In bringing them
out in a book form my first intention was to embody in an Appendix
the mass of materials, as well as the discussion of several secondary
points, which had to be omitted in the review articles. It appeared,
however, that the Appendix would double the size of the book, and I
was compelled to abandon, or, at least, to postpone its publication. The
present Appendix includes the discussion of only a few points which
have been the matter of scientific controversy during the last few years;
and into the text I have introduced only such matter as could be

introduced without altering the structure of the work.
I am glad of this opportunity for expressing to the editor of the
Nineteenth Century, Mr. James Knowles, my very best thanks, both for
the kind hospitality which he offered to these papers in his review, as
soon as he knew their general idea, and the permission he kindly gave
me to reprint them.
Bromley, Kent, 1902.
CHAPTER I
MUTUAL AID AMONG ANIMALS
Struggle for existence. Mutual Aid a law of Nature and chief factor of
progressive evolution. Invertebrates. Ants and Bees. Birds, hunting and
fishing associations. Sociability. Mutual protection among small birds.
Cranes, parrots.

The conception of struggle for existence as a factor of evolution,
introduced into science by Darwin and Wallace, has permitted us to
embrace an immensely wide range of phenomena in one single
generalization, which soon became the very basis of our philosophical,
biological, and sociological speculations. An immense variety of
facts:--adaptations of function and structure of organic beings to their
surroundings; physiological and anatomical evolution; intellectual
progress, and moral development itself, which we formerly used to
explain by so many different causes, were embodied by Darwin in one
general conception. We understood them as continued endeavours--as a
struggle against adverse circumstances--for such a development of
individuals, races, species and societies, as would result in the greatest
possible fulness, variety, and intensity of life. It may be that at the
outset Darwin himself was not fully aware of the generality of the
factor which he first invoked for explaining one series only of facts
relative to the accumulation of individual variations in incipient species.
But he foresaw that the term which he was introducing into science

would lose its philosophical and its only true meaning if it were to be
used in its narrow sense only--that of a struggle between separate
individuals for the sheer means of existence. And at the very beginning
of his memorable work he insisted upon the term being taken in its
"large and metaphorical sense including dependence of one being on
another, and including (which is more important) not only the life of
the individual, but success in leaving progeny."(1)
While he himself was chiefly using the term in its narrow sense for his
own special purpose, he warned his followers against committing the
error (which he seems once to have committed himself) of overrating
its narrow meaning. In The Descent of Man he gave some powerful
pages to illustrate its proper, wide sense. He pointed out how, in
numberless animal societies, the struggle between separate individuals
for the means of existence disappears, how struggle is replaced by
co-operation, and how that substitution results in the development of
intellectual and moral faculties which secure to the species the best
conditions for survival. He intimated that in such cases the fittest are
not the physically strongest, nor the cunningest, but those who learn to
combine so as mutually to support each other, strong and weak alike,
for the welfare of the community. "Those communities," he wrote,
"which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members
would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring" (2nd
edit., p. 163). The term, which originated from the narrow Malthusian
conception of competition between each and all, thus lost its
narrowness in the mind of one who knew Nature.
Unhappily, these remarks, which might have become the basis