Social Origins and Primal Law
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One important fact must here, however, be noted; that before such death or exile takes place, and the sons reach an age which enables them successfully to dispute the supremacy of the father, the daughters have reached puberty and borne produce to the sire – this matter, as will be seen later, has an important bearing on our general argument – on our theory of Primal Law. Amongst horses, again, which have become wild, exactly the same facts are to be observed. Each herd has one head, and this, as natural selection would imply, is the most powerful stallion; he is the master and owner of the females, and this mastery he retains until overpowered by other males, which, as before, are almost invariably his own progeny. In fact, any strange male would probably have first to run the gauntlet of this outlying herd of exiled sons before he could reach the father. It is, however, again to be noted that he is rarely thus overpowered by even the combined efforts of his sons, before his daughters have reached such an age as to have produced offspring to their father.
This system of sequence of generations in breeding is, indeed, so universal in a state of nature amongst all animals, as to seem to point to the fact that in-breeding between father and daughter cannot be so prejudicial as some believe. Its efficacy in type-fixing is at least very great, if, as experiments of my own in pig-breeding on these lines would lead me to think, the question of prepotency is merely a matter of such close in-breeding repeated for generations. We may note here that if, as is probable, the produce, on the contrary, of a full brother and sister are degenerate, nature seems to attempt to prevent its occurrence. On the succession of the sons to the father's rights, speedy conflicts from sexual jealousy arise amidst the former and lead to a rapid segregation of the herd, in which the chances of own brother and sister continuing to mate are slight. Until this segregration, however, does take place, nothing is more curious to watch than the attitude and relations of these young males among themselves, the oldest and strongest claiming prior marital rights, but no more.
The same phenomena in social economy may be observed with even greater intensity in lower ranks of life than the quadrupeds. For instance, in a large flock of game fowl which I had an opportunity to observe closely for several years, during which they had nearly relapsed into a state of nature, there was an exact reproduction of all these details. There existed the same division into small family groups, each headed by an adult male, the same subordination imposed on the junior males of their banishment at puberty, as also their inevitable combined attack, when sufficiently powerful, on their paternal enemy. His death resulted in the same communistic assumption of his rights, with a subsequent disruption, from jealousy, into the typical smaller and separate groups.
We thus find an identical condition of the sexual relations between the females of a group and its older and younger male members to be common in the animal world – the domination, in fact, of an idea that might, in the person of the senior male, confers marital rights over the female members of the family, and an inchoate rule of action resulting therefrom; which bars from the enjoyment of such right each junior male. To hold that man, whilst in the animal stage, should form an exception to the general rule seems unreasonable. If, as we are inclined to believe, he was originally a quite non-social animal, the fact becomes more possible still that, as with modern types of anthropoid apes, each adult as head of a group was at feud with every other. As regards the social evolution, it would indeed seem most natural that, as Mr. Darwin conceived, the first step in progress should have been taken by animals already united gregariously, and thus already imbued with some social feelings. Strange to say, the path in advance which the ancestor of man, in the light of our hypothesis, was destined to follow, disclosed itself as an indirect consequence of the very intensity of his non-social characteristic. In fact, as I fancy mil become evident in the development of our argument, the only line of progress open to man was one inaccessible to animals of gregarious habits, judging by the economy of life in a troop of mandrills or baboons.
Having ventured to differ from the great naturalist on this point, I would with deference take exception to his further statement – 'That the younger males, being thus expelled and wandering about, would, when at last successful in finding a partner, prevent too close inter-breeding within the limits of the same family.' This, if I understand it rightly, would convey the idea that this youthful band quitted the scene of their birth, and deserted entirely their original habitat in the forest. I cannot help considering it an error to imagine that such wanderings could thus be without bounds. Nothing seems to me more remarkable and irrevocable in savage Nature than the rigid localisation of all living things in her realm. No fish in the sea, no bird in the air, but has its local habitation, which only becomes free to the stranger on the death of the occupant.281 No corner on earth but seems to hold its lawful tenant, and the bounds thereof are defined within rigid limits. Within, there is safety, with a sense of ownership; without, is the great unknown, possessed by others, fiercely ready to defend their rights, and threaten every danger and death to the stranger intruder – unless quite otherwise formidable than adolescent youth.
It is thus probable, in fact, that in common with the lower animals, the band of exiled young males of our anthropoid ancestor haunted the neighbourhood of the parent herd, remaining thus on familiar ground, and in hearing of friendly voices. For we must remember that their feud was only with the paternal parent. In the magic alembic of time the constantly increasing shadow of their presence would take sudden dreadful form, but in parricidal crime alone. The sequel in disastrous incest, which Mr. Darwin would here conjecture at, Nature alone has ever been impotent to deal with. The problem of an effectual bar to undesirable union between brother and sister was solved by man alone, and in the Primal Law. An effort of his embryonic intellect, thus early defiant of Nature, the law placed ethically, for once and for ever, a distinction between him and every other creature.
CHAPTER III
MAN VARYING FROM ANIMALS
Effect of the absence of a special pairing season on nascent man. – Consequent state of ceaseless war between sire and young males. – Man already more than an ape. – Results of his prolonged infancy and of maternal love. – A young male permitted to live in the parent group. – Conditions in which this novelty arose.
In common, then, with their nearest congeners of to-day, we have found each male head of a group of our anthropoid ancestors in direct antagonism with every other male, and a consequent disruption of the family at each encounter with a superior force. This disruption, in its effects on a species of non-gregarious habits, would result not only in the dispersal of its members, but in the destruction of what material progress in the accumulation of property might have accrued. As this would have included all germs of mechanical discovery, again doubtless due solely to the superior constructive faculties of the male, it is evident that advance in a race thus socially constituted was quite impossible.
Now this antagonism of male with male, with all its retrograde consequences, a struggle fierce enough in all animals, had a more intense effect on nascent man than on any other creature that had ever existed. An added force was caused by the disappearance in the nascent human species of that season of physical and mental repose, granted by Nature to the rest of creation, when not actually in the moment or season of rut. This ever-recurring but limited period, ordinarily appearing for a certain fixed epoch in each year, by the exigencies of supply and demand in the necessarily abundant food required for nursing mothers, had lost its date-fixing power with this new creation – Man. With the very first steps in progress would come his adaptation to a more or less omnivorous and consequently more regular diet. The consequent modification would be profound in the matter of sexual habit and appetite. Man needed no longer to put limits to the season of love and desire.282 This was a crime against Nature, new in the history of the world, a crime which Nature would probably have avenged by race-deterioration or extermination, if the germs of mental power had not been already strong enough to lift him, Man, to be, of all creatures, almost completely beyond the influence of environment, thence of Nature herself.
The intensity of the evil led to its cure. In a state of society where literally every male creature's hand was against the other, and life one continual uproar from their contending strife; where not only was there no instant's truce in the war-fare, but each blow dealt was emphasised (fatally) by the intellectual finesse which now directed it, it became a question of forced advance in progress or straight retreat in annihilation as a species. However difficult it may be to imagine by what path such a creature was ever to emerge from the materialistic labyrinth in which we thus find him involved, it is sure that he neither could nor did remain there. A forward step was somehow taken, some road out of the maze was somehow found.
It remains for us to trace, by what dim light of custom and tradition we may, the faint trail of those momentous footprints, which, however lame and halting, took the strait and difficult way to a higher life. We may expect to find, as is but natural, that the path was one before untrodden. As man followed it, at first unconsciously, from the shoulders of this new pilgrim, predestined to worthier burdens, would fall some of the heavy load of the mere animal nature.
There was now, in fact, to be a break in the economy of animal nature, as regards that vicious circle, where we found an ever-recurring violent succession to the solitary paternal tyrant, by sons whose parricidal hands were so soon again clenched in fratricidal strife. In the dawn of peace between this father and son we shall find the signpost to the new highway.
Before going further, we may here state our assumption that, when our ancestor had arrived at this crisis in his life, a crisis involving the vast psychological step in advance implied in the development of society, and the intelligence necessary for the evolution of the law in its regulation, he was already somewhat more than ape. The animal stage as forming part of the ladder of ascent from brute to man would be marked by degrees of progression, each a step further removed from the original type. These very earliest steps we indeed propose to examine later in detail, for the present we will suppose they have been taken, and that the influence of environment, under certain hypothetic conditions, to be also detailed hereafter, has fostered physical modifications towards the human type such as we found in the matter of rut. But in nature the relation is very close between the physical and the mental qualities. The advance in one would possibly lead to a corresponding development of the other. Each is the necessary complement of each. For instance, as Mr. Darwin has pointed out, while the lower extremities become more and more used for progression alone, so the upper, thus left free, would be specialised as prehensile organs, so becoming both valet and tutor to the nascent brain. To push our metaphor to an extreme, we may say that when Homo Alalus trod the new path, it was already as a biped in an upright attitude, thus leaving at least his hand free to point it out to others, for as yet his tongue, at least by the hypothesis, was inarticulate.
Our line of research as regards the new departure was at once narrowed when we indicated that it ended in the peaceful conjunction of father and son. Our path will lie in the examination of the question as to what possible series of natural circumstances, in the domestic life of the race, could lead to such conjunction, and what law in such an age could suffice for regulation of such association if formed. We shall have to examine more closely (as far as our imagination will aid us) the exact conditions of the family life of the semi-human group which we have supposed typical in that era, i.e. the small isolated band of anthropoids, composed of a single polygamous adult male with dependent wives and offspring. His possible relations with these, especially his attitude towards his male children, will interest us. Therein should certainly be found the desired series of circumstances entailing a critical situation, whose happy resolution shall furnish the clue to the problem of that possible aggregation on which all future progress depends. However strange it may appear, it will be found, as we have already said, that the abnormal conditions imposed by the unnatural modifications of the sexual functions have served as a means to the end of advance in progress. And as, by their action in the past, anthropoid man had become the most sexually jealous and intractable of all creatures, so it may be expected that the series of causes which shall have for effect the restraint of such excess of passion, will possess further vast potentiality of action. Such latency in potentiality is evidently indispensable when we consider that there is here concerned the evolution of law in opposition to nature, and its triumph for all time over the mere brute.
But first as regards the fact of the association of adult males on friendly terms within the group, which fact has seemed to us to constitute the whole problem of progress, it would on a hasty view appear as if it had been already found in the band of exiled sons which we have seen haunting the parent horde. Here we meet with that aggregation of individuals whose combination in peaceful union should apparently be the result of some law in regulation. This idea would even seem to gain support from the fact that all the members being brothers, and living most probably in a state of polyandry, we here appear to find fulfilled exactly those genetic conditions of primitive marriage imperative according to Mr. McLennan's theory of the origin of society. It will not, however, be difficult to prove that, at least at this stage in evolution, such a group would lack the most essential elements of stability. Their unity, in fact, as has been already pointed out, could only endure as long as the youthfulness of the members necessitated union for protection, and their immaturity prevented the full play of the sexual passion. The horde would inevitably dissolve under the influence of jealousy at the adult stage, especially if, as is probable, the number of their female captives had increased with the gain in years and power. The necessary Primal Law which alone could determine peace within a family circle by recognising a distinction between female and female (the indispensable antecedent to a definition of marital rights) could never have arisen in such a body. It follows that if such law was ever evoked, it must have been from within the only other assembly in existence, viz. that headed by the solitary polygamous patriarch, 'the Cyclopean family.'
We have said that this family would be composed of the male head and his wives, the latter consisting of captured females, and further, let us note, of his own adult female offspring, accompanied by a troop of infants of both sexes. The absence of male offspring beyond those of tender years would be another most notable phenomenon. These sons would, as we have seen, have been banished at puberty from the herd, in common with the habit of most animals.
Now we have surmised that at this stage our subject has been modified, both physically and mentally, to a certain extent in approach to the human type, and there is precisely one special modification which would have been of paramount importance in view of the problem of advance in progress. For if we may thus infer a certain increase in the longevity of the nascent race at even so early a stage in evolution, then that evidently entails a more prolonged infancy. It follows that, however precocious, the young males before exile must have passed at least nine to ten helpless years under their mother's care. But, again, the rise of superior intellectual faculties in general presupposes a decided increase in the powers of memory, and this agent, in connection with that of the longer companionship, would here set in movement, sooner or later, a psychological factor of strangely magnified force as compared with what it is in the mere brute – namely, human maternal love.
Separation, however caused, between this mother and her child would be far more severely felt than by any other animal. At the renewed banishment of each of her male progeny by the jealous patriarch, the mother's feelings and instinct would be increasingly lacerated and outraged. Her agonised efforts to retain at least her last and youngest would be even stronger than with her first-born. It is exceedingly important to observe that her chances of success in this case would be much greater. When this last and dearest son approached adolescence, it is not difficult to perceive that the patriarch must have reached an age when the fire of desire may have become somewhat dull; whilst, again, his harem, from the presence of numerous adult daughters, would be increased to an extent that might have overtaxed his once more active powers. Given some such rather exceptional situation, where a happy opportunity in superlative mother love wrestled with a for once satiated paternal appetite in desire, we may here discern a possible key of the sociological problem which occupies us, and which consisted in a conjunction within one group of two adult males.
We must conceive that, in the march of the centuries, on some fateful day, the bloody tragedy in the last act of the familiar drama was avoided, and the edict of exile or death left unpronounced. Pure maternal love triumphed over the demons of lust and jealousy. A mother succeeded in keeping by her side a male child, and thus, by a strange coincidence, that father and son, who, amongst all mammals, had been the most deadly of enemies, were now the first to join hands. So portentous an alliance might well bring the world to their feet. The family group would now present, for the first time, the till then unknown spectacle of the inclusion within a domestic circle, and amidst its component females, of an adolescent male youth. It must, however, be admitted that such an event, at such an epoch, demanded imperatively very exceptional qualities, both physiological and psychological, in the primitive agents. The new happy ending to that old-world drama which had run for so long through blood and tears, was an innovation requiring very unusually gifted actors. How many failures had doubtless taken place in its rehearsal during the centuries, with less able or happy interpreters! It is probable that, in the new experiment, success was rendered possible by the rise of new powers in nascent man. Some feeble germ of altruism may already have arisen to make its force felt as an important factor.
It is also certain that, with such prolonged infancy, there had been opportunity for the development of paternal philo-progenitiveness. It is evident that such long-continued presence of sons could but result in a certain mutual sympathy, however inevitable the eventual exile.
The love and care of a parent for his offspring is, after all, ethically speaking, the normal condition. Habitual desertion at too early an age would be fatal. Their dissociation, the abnormal and only one, took place under the influence of the strongest passion in nature, again largely exaggerated in primitive man. But in such an era purely physical characteristics would undoubtedly have also a vast influence in the development of the incident we have tried to depict. The fiercely solitary patriarch who first consented to the intrusive presence within his family circle of another adult male was, as I think we can prove, a being of abnormal physical power as compared with his fellows. For we have assumed satiety in desire to have been a powerful factor in the innovatory struggle we have witnessed. But such satiety implies extensive polygamy, and yet again a large harem composed exclusively of unwilling outside captives is incredible, escape for them in the primeval forest being too facile. Thus the harem would certainly be formed of the female offspring of the tyrant himself. These alone would need no watch or guard, for them the unknown outside world was hostile ground. But again very many adult daughters imply a father stricken in years. That one of such advanced age, in an epoch when force was all in all, could, defiant of rivals, still retain possession of his female kind, presupposes vast enduring physical power, or at least the protective tradition of past exceptional strength, still enduring in terror. If, again, at so early a date in the history of man we may be permitted to surmise any development of the faculty of psychogenesis, then we may again perceive how extreme physical qualities might have facilitated the solution of the problem of the admission of the intrusive male. For it is credible that long undisputed supremacy of power as the result of personal vigour might, in its incredulous contempt of a possible rivalry, show a tolerance of a situation utterly impossible to a weaker nature.
CHAPTER IV
EARLIEST EVOLUTION OF LAW
Trace between semi-human sire and son. – Consequent distinction taken between female and female, as such – Consequent rise of habit of Brother and Sister Avoidance. – Result, son seeks female mate from without Note by the editor.
In what, then, we are willing to concede, must have been exceptional circumstances, may thus have been taken that first step in progress which was to lead to such vast advance. In a development of the social qualities depended the whole future of mankind, and here we seem to see their germ and birth.
When, however, we affirm that the triumph of maternal love in the continued companionship of a male child, constituted the solution of the social problem before us, we do not intend to convey the idea that it lay solely in the fact of a simple inclusion of male offspring within a group. Such a condition, however significant in the actual case, has nothing in itself but what is common to the family economy of many animals. It is the normal one, for instance, among many pithecoids, as baboons, &c., where we find the younger males still form an integral part of the horde, although denied all marital rights. But, however inexorable among such species the temporary separation from the females during the actual season of rut, there is at other times a propinquity in amity as members of the same herd, which lessened doubtless the fierceness of the strife during the periodic play of passion, a truce in fact admitting of peace and alliance in offence and defence during most of the year.
With our ancestors there could be no such healing pause, the unnatural sexual modification of the race had rendered it impossible. The non-periodicity of the sexual function in rut would have made the whole year, with two adult males in presence, an interval of trial insupportable to the mere brute. With this race the banishment of the youth would be for all time, and the loss would be not only that of an ally, each exile would become an active enemy. Now we have hinted that the importance, in a potential sense, of a movement towards union, in such creatures, arose precisely from the fact that, on account of the intensity of the relations between male and male, and especially between father and son, their amicable conjunction was only possible under such exceptional conditions as would probably conduce to its stability whenever it did take place.
Indeed such inchoate rule or habit, a corollary of the early idea, as reigns in regulation of marital rights among lower creatures, would not be fully adequate for this higher creation. With lower creatures, might alone confers rights, which feebler force ever seeks each chance to invade, all stratagems being legitimate as a means to that end. With inchoate man such imperfect rule of action had become utterly impossible. The greater endowment in memory and reason entailed a too fatally added hate on non-compliance. For inchoate men the requisite law required such further exactness in definition as should leave no doubt of a meaning, not only to be understood, but to be accepted and obeyed unconditionally.