Page:Nature and Man.djvu/26

Rh suppose that an adult animal can return to its mother's womb.

In early tribal times natural selection still imposed the death penalty on failure. The stronger, the more cunning, the better armed, the more courageous tribe or family group, exterminated by actual slaughter or starvation the neighbouring tribes less gifted in one or all of these qualities. But from what we know of the history of warlike exterminating savage tribes at the present day—as, for instance, the Masai of East Africa—it seems unlikely that the method of extermination—that is, of true natural selection—had much effect in man's development after the very earliest period. Union and absorption were more usual results of the contact of primitive tribes than struggles to the death. The expulsion of one group by another from a desired territory was more usual than the destruction of the conquered. In spite of the frequent assertions to the contrary, it seems that neither the more ancient wars of mankind for conquest and migration nor the present and future wars for commercial privilege have any real equivalence to the simple removal by death of the unfit and the survival and reproduction of the fit, which we know as Natural Selection5.

The standard raised by the rebel man is not that of 'fitness' to the conditions proffered by extra-human nature, but is one of an ideal comfort, prosperity, and conscious joy in life—imposed by the will of man and involving a control and in important respects a subversion of what were Nature's methods of dealing with life before she had produced her insurgent son. The progress of man in the acquirement of this control of