Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/172

160 animal rivals, and command the life-supporting products of the earth. These transcendent powers, by which the brute creation had been subjugated, men soon turned against each other, and the battle of life between man and man became as terrible as that between man and beast. But, unlike the fierce predatory mammals and the antediluvian monsters over which he had triumphed, the human animal soon ceased to carry on an isolated, individual, effort of self-preservation. Out of the early sexual association of mating, which he developed in common with many other creatures, there sprang the family, the tribe, and finally the nation. Co-operative organization was begun, from which has grown what we call civilized life.

The first grouping of many individuals into a tribe was the birth into the world of a new organism. This new organism has in the course of ages so grown, and developed, and differentiated in the complexity of its functions and structures, that it is recognized by modern philosophy; and the dawning study of the laws under which it lives constitutes the infant science of sociology.

We can not stop here to demonstrate this assertion, which the advanced thought of to-day has accepted and which the world at large is coming more and more to understand, that society, like the individuals of which it is made up, is an organism living by constant adaptation to its environment. To those who deny this, no inquiry into the main topic of our discussion is possible. Assuming it, therefore, to be a necessary postulate to all economic study, let us proceed to examine the character of that organism at the earliest stage of its growth.

The prehistoric human being, or unit with which the social structure was built, must have been, from our nineteenth-century standpoint, near akin to the brutes in the savageness of his instincts. Bred to a life of peril and physical conflict, the aggressive and predatory in his nature must have far exceeded any germs of those gentler attributes at present thought to be distinctively human, Now, as the nature of any whole must be determined by the aggregate natures of its component parts, the super-organic whole which the combination of these earlier individuals created must have displayed in a general way their common traits. In a word, the early tribe or germinal society was an aggressive, predatory organism, striving to perpetuate itself by the annihilation of all similar organisms with which it came into competition.

Why this fact is of importance to our discussion we can at once show. If all organisms perpetuate themselves by the adaptation of their structures to the particular circumstances of their lives, then a knowledge of these circumstances must be a key