hich fighting is the avowed and characteristic
employment of the group. But it is not implied that there has been an
abrupt transition from unbroken peace and good-will to a later or higher
phase of life in which the fact of combat occurs for the first time.
Neither is it implied that all peaceful industry disappears on the
transition to the predatory phase of culture. Some fighting, it is safe
to say, would be met with at any early stage of social development.
Fights would occur with more or less frequency through sexual
competition. The known habits of primitive groups, as well as the habits
of the anthropoid apes, argue to that effect, and the evidence from the
well-known promptings of human nature enforces the same view.

It may therefore be objected that there can have been no such initial
stage of peaceable life as is here assumed. There is no point in
cultural evolution prior to which fighting does not occur. But the
point in question is not as to the occurrence of combat, occasional or
sporadic, or even more or less frequent and habitual; it is a question
as to the occurrence of an habitual; it is a question as to the
occurrence of an habitual bellicose frame of mind--a prevalent habit
of judging facts and events from the point of view of the fight. The
predatory phase of culture is attained only when the predatory attitude
has become the habitual and accredited spiritual attitude for the
members of the group; when the fight has become the dominant note in the
current theory of life; when the common-sense appreciation of men and
things has come to be an appreciation with a view to combat.

The substantial difference between the peaceable and the predatory phase
of culture, therefore, is a spiritual difference, not a mechanical one.
The change in spiritual attitude is the outgrowth of a change in the
material facts of the life of the group, and it comes on gradually as
the material circumstances favourable to a predatory attitude supervene.
The inferior limit of the predatory culture is an industrial limit.
Predation can not become the habitual, conventional resource of any
group or any class until industrial methods have been developed to such
a degree of efficiency as to leave a margin worth fighting for, above
the subsistence of those engaged in getting a living. The transition
from peace to predation therefore depends on the growth of technical
knowledge and the use of tools. A predatory culture is similarly