stones, the sifted
debris of Swiss palafittes, a few pithecoid jawbones, some painted rocks
from Salamanca, produces a fairly definite picture of the earliest
essentially human being on earth: and we recognise a man not unlike one
of ourselves; with a similar industry interrupted from time to time by
the arbitrary stirrings of a similar artistic impulse; so close to us
indeed that some of his habits still survive among us. Some of us at
least have made a recreation of his necessity, and still go hunting wild
or hypothetically wild animals for food. But when this primeval hunter
emerged from his lair in the forest or his valley-cave, he was prepared
to attack at sight any man he happened to meet: and he thought himself a
fine fellow if he succeeded in cracking the skull of a possible rival in
love or venery. This was the age of preventive aggression with a
vengeance. We still feel a certain satisfaction in a prompt and crushing
blow, and in the simplicity of violence. But we no longer attack our
neighbour in the street, as dogs fight over a bone or over nothing at
all: though some of us reserve the right to snarl.

Sec. 6

Tribe against Tribe

But this fighter's paradise was too exciting to last long; and indeed it
is hard to visualise steadily the feral solitary man who lived without
any social organisation at all.[2] Consideration like an angel came and
did not indeed drive the offending devil out of him but taught him to
guide it into more profitable channels, by co-operating with his
neighbour. When a man first made peace with the hunter in the next cave
in order to go out with him against the bear at the head of the valley,
or even to have his assistance in carrying off a couple of women from
the family down by the lake, on that day the social and moral unit was
constituted, the sphere of morality, destined, who knows how soon, to
include the whole of mankind in one beneficent alliance, began with what
Professor McDougal has called "the replacement of individual by
collective pugnacity." The first clear stage in this progress is the
tribe or clan, the smallest organised community, sometimes no larger
than the self-contained village or camp, which can still be found in the
wild parts of the earth. Tribe against tribe is the formula of this
order of civilisation. Within the limits of the community man inhibits
his natural impulses and settles his personal disputes according to the
rules laid down by the headman