elationships which constitute
what we know as the family; and it is easy to see how the existence
of helpless infants would bring about just that state of things.
The necessity of caring for the infants would prolong the period of
maternal affection, and would tend to keep the father and mother
and children together, but it would tend especially to keep the
mother and children together. This business of the marital
relations was not really a thing that became adjusted in the
primitive ages of man, but it has become adjusted in the course of
civilization. Real monogamy, real faithfulness of the male parent,
belongs to a comparatively advanced stage; but in the early stages
the knitting together of permanent relations between mother and
infant, and the approximation toward steady relations on the part
of the male parent, came to bring about the family, and gradually
to knit those organizations which we know as clans.

Here we come to another stage, another step forward. The instant
society becomes organized in clans, natural selection cannot let
these clans be broken up and die out,--the clan becomes the chief
object or care of natural selection, because if you destroy it you
retrograde again, you lose all you have gained; consequently, those
clans in which the primeval selfish instincts were so modified that
the individual conduct would be subordinated to some extent to the
needs of the clan,--those are the ones which would prevail in the
struggle for life. In this way you gradually get an external
standard to which man has to conform his conduct, and you get the
germs of altruism and morality; and in the prolonged affectionate
relation between the mother and the infant you get the opportunity
for that development of altruistic feeling which, once started in
those relations, comes into play in the more general relations, and
makes more feasible and more workable the bonds which keep society
together, and enable it to unite on wider and wider terms.

So it seems that from a very small beginning we are reaching a very
considerable result. I had got these facts pretty clearly worked
out, and carried them around with me some years, before a, fresh
conclusion came over me one day with a feeling of surprise. In the
old days before the Copernican astronomy was promulgated, man
regarded himself as the centre of the universe. He used to
entertain theological systems which conformed to his limited
knowledge of nature. T