In the animal world we have seen that the vast majority of species live in societies, and that they find in association the best arms for the struggle for life: understood, of course, in its wide Darwinian sense — not as a struggle for the sheer means of existence, but as a struggle against all natural conditions unfavourable to the species. The animal species, in which individual struggle has been reduced to its narrowest limits, and the practice of mutual aid has attained4 the greatest development, are invariably the most numerous, the most prosperous, and the most open to further progress. The mutual protection which is obtained in this case, the possibility of attaining5 old age and of accumulating experience, the higher intellectual development, and the further growth of sociable6 habits, secure the maintenance of the species, its extension, and its further progressive evolution. The unsociable species, on the contrary, are doomed7 to decay.
Going next over to man, we found him living in clans8 and tribes at the very dawn of the stone age; we saw a wide series of social institutions developed already in the lower savage10 stage, in the clan9 and the tribe; and we found that the earliest tribal11 customs and habits gave to mankind the embryo12 of all the institutions which made later on the leading aspects of further progress. Out of the savage tribe grew up the barbarian13 village community; and a new, still wider, circle of social customs, habits, and institutions, numbers of which are still alive among ourselves, was developed under the principles of common possession of a given territory and common defence of it, under the jurisdiction14 of the village folkmote, and in the federation15 of villages belonging, or supposed to belong, to one stem. And when new requirements induced men to make a new start, they made it in the city, which represented a double network of territorial16 units (village communities), connected with guilds17 these latter arising out of the common prosecution19 of a given art or craft, or for mutual support and defence.
And finally, in the last two chapters facts were produced to show that although the growth of the State on the pattern of Imperial Rome had put a violent end to all medieval institutions for mutual support, this new aspect of civilization could not last. The State, based upon loose aggregations20 of individuals and undertaking21 to be their only bond of union, did not answer its purpose. The mutual-aid tendency finally broke down its iron rules; it reappeared and reasserted itself in an infinity22 of associations which now tend to embrace all aspects of life and to take possession of all that is required by man for life and for reproducing the waste occasioned by life.
It will probably be remarked that mutual aid, even though it may represent one of the factors of evolution, covers nevertheless one aspect only of human relations; that by the side of this current, powerful though it may be, there is, and always has been, the other current — the self-assertion of the individual, not only in its efforts to attain3 personal or caste superiority, economical, political, and spiritual, but also in its much more important although less evident function of breaking through the bonds, always prone23 to become crystallized, which the tribe, the village community, the city, and the State impose upon the individual. In other words, there is the self-assertion of the individual taken as a progressive element.
It is evident that no review of evolution can be complete, unless these two dominant24 currents are analyzed25. However, the self-assertion of the individual or of groups of individuals, their struggles for superiority, and the conflicts which resulted therefrom, have already been analyzed, described, and glorified26 from time immemorial. In fact, up to the present time, this current alone has received attention from the epical27 poet, the annalist, the historian, and the sociologist28. History, such as it has hitherto been written, is almost entirely29 a description of the ways and means by which theocracy30, military power, autocracy31, and, later on, the richer classes’ rule have been promoted, established, and maintained. The struggles between these forces make, in fact, the substance of history. We may thus take the knowledge of the individual factor in human history as granted — even though there is full room for a new study of the subject on the lines just alluded32 to; while, on the other side, the mutual-aid factor has been hitherto totally lost sight of; it was simply denied, or even scoffed33 at, by the writers of the present and past generation. It was therefore necessary to show, first of all, the immense part which this factor plays in the evolution of both the animal world and human societies. Only after this has been fully34 recognized will it be possible to proceed to a comparison between the two factors.
To make even a rough estimate of their relative importance by any method more or less statistical35, is evidently impossible. One single war — we all know — may be productive of more evil, immediate36 and subsequent, than hundreds of years of the unchecked action of the mutual-aid principle may be productive of good. But when we see that in the animal world, progressive development and mutual aid go hand in hand, while the inner struggle within the species is concomitant with retrogressive development; when we notice that with man, even success in struggle and war is proportionate to the development of mutual aid in each of the two conflicting nations, cities, parties, or tribes, and that in the process of evolution war itself (so far as it can go this way) has been made subservient37 to the ends of progress in mutual aid within the nation, the city or the clan — we already obtain a perception of the dominating influence of the mutual-aid factor as an element of progress. But we see also that the practice of mutual aid and its successive developments have created the very conditions of society life in which man was enabled to develop his arts, knowledge, and intelligence; and that the periods when institutions based on the mutual-aid tendency took their greatest development were also the periods of the greatest progress in arts, industry, and science. In fact, the study of the inner life of the medieval city and of the ancient Greek cities reveals the fact that the combination of mutual aid, as it was practised within the guild18 and the Greek clan, with a large initiative which was left to the individual and the group by means of the federative principle, gave to mankind the two greatest periods of its history — the ancient Greek city and the medieval city periods; while the ruin of the above institutions during the State periods of history, which followed, corresponded in both cases to a rapid decay.
As to the sudden industrial progress which has been achieved during our own century, and which is usually ascribed to the triumph of individualism and competition, it certainly has a much deeper origin than that. Once the great discoveries of the fifteenth century were made, especially that of the pressure of the atmosphere, supported by a series of advances in natural philosophy — and they were made under the medieval city organization — once these discoveries were made, the invention of the steam-motor, and all the revolution which the conquest of a new power implied, had necessarily to follow. If the medieval cities had lived to bring their discoveries to that point, the ethical38 consequences of the revolution effected by steam might have been different; but the same revolution in technics and science would have inevitably39 taken place. It remains40, indeed, an open question whether the general decay of industries which followed the ruin of the free cities, and was especially noticeable in the first part of the eighteenth century, did not considerably41 retard42 the appearance of the steam-engine as well as the consequent revolution in arts. When we consider the astounding43 rapidity of industrial progress from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries — in weaving, working of metals, architecture and navigation, and ponder over the scientific discoveries which that industrial progress led to at the end of the fifteenth century — we must ask ourselves whether mankind was not delayed in its taking full advantage of these conquests when a general depression of arts and industries took place in Europe after the decay of medieval civilization. Surely it was not the disappearance44 of the artist-artisan, nor the ruin of large cities and the extinction45 of intercourse46 between them, which could favour the industrial revolution; and we know indeed that James Watt47 spent twenty or more years of his life in order to render his invention serviceable, because he could not find in the last century what he would have readily found in medieval Florence or Brugge, that is, the artisans capable of realizing his devices in metal, and of giving them the artistic48 finish and precision which the steam-engine requires.
To attribute, therefore, the industrial progress of our century to the war of each against all which it has proclaimed, is to reason like the man who, knowing not the causes of rain, attributes it to the victim he has immolated49 before his clay idol50. For industrial progress, as for each other conquest over nature, mutual aid and close intercourse certainly are, as they have been, much more advantageous51 than mutual struggle.
However, it is especially in the domain52 of ethics53 that. the dominating importance of the mutual-aid principle appears in full. That mutual aid is the real foundation of our ethical conceptions seems evident enough. But whatever the opinions as to the first origin of the mutual-aid feeling or instinct may be whether a biological or a supernatural cause is ascribed to it — we must trace its existence as far back as to the lowest stages of the animal world; and from these stages we can follow its uninterrupted evolution, in opposition54 to a number of contrary agencies, through all degrees of human development, up to the present times. Even the new religions which were born from time to time — always at epochs when the mutual-aid principle was falling into decay in the theocracies55 and despotic States of the East, or at the decline of the Roman Empire — even the new religions have only reaffirmed that same principle. They found their first supporters among the humble56, in the lowest, downtrodden layers of society, where the mutual-aid principle is the necessary foundation of every-day life; and the new forms of union which were introduced in the earliest Buddhist57 and Christian58 communities, in the Moravian brotherhoods59 and so on, took the character of a return to the best aspects of mutual aid i n early tribal life.
Each time, however, that an attempt to return to this old principle was made, its fundamental idea itself was widened. From the clan it was extended to the stem, to the federation of stems, to the nation, and finally — in ideal, at least — to the whole of mankind. It was also refined at the same time. In primitive60 Buddhism61, in primitive Christianity, in the writings of some of the Mussulman teachers, in the early movements of the Reform, and especially in the ethical and philosophical62 movements of the last century and of our own times, the total abandonment of the idea of revenge, or of “due reward”— of good for good and evil for evil — is affirmed more and more vigorously. The higher conception of “no revenge for wrongs,” and of freely giving more than one expects to receive from his neighbours, is proclaimed as being the real principle of morality — a principle superior to mere63 equivalence, equity64, or justice, and more conducive65 to happiness. And man is appealed to to be guided in his acts, not merely by love, which is always personal, or at the best tribal, but by the perception of his oneness with each human being. In the practice of mutual aid, which we can retrace66 to the earliest beginnings of evolution, we thus find the positive and undoubted origin of our ethical conceptions; and we can affirm that in the ethical progress of man, mutual support not mutual struggle — has had the leading part. In its wide extension, even at the present time, we also see the best guarantee of a still loftier evolution of our race.
The End
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1
mutual
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| adj.相互的，彼此的；共同的，共有的 | |
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2
inquiry
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| n.打听，询问，调查，查问 | |
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attain
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| vt.达到，获得，完成 | |
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attained
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| （通常经过努力）实现( attain的过去式和过去分词 )； 达到； 获得； 达到（某年龄、水平、状况） | |
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attaining
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| （通常经过努力）实现( attain的现在分词 )； 达到； 获得； 达到（某年龄、水平、状况） | |
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sociable
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| adj.好交际的，友好的，合群的 | |
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doomed
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| 命定的 | |
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clans
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| 宗族( clan的名词复数 )； 氏族； 庞大的家族； 宗派 | |
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clan
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| n.氏族，部落，宗族，家族，宗派 | |
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savage
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| adj.野蛮的；凶恶的，残暴的；n.未开化的人 | |
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tribal
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| adj.部族的，种族的 | |
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embryo
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| n.胚胎，萌芽的事物 | |
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barbarian
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| n.野蛮人；adj.野蛮(人)的；未开化的 | |
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jurisdiction
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| n.司法权，审判权，管辖权，控制权 | |
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federation
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| n.同盟，联邦，联合，联盟，联合会 | |
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territorial
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| adj.领土的，领地的 | |
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guilds
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| 行会，同业公会，协会( guild的名词复数 ) | |
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guild
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| n.行会，同业公会，协会 | |
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prosecution
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| n.起诉，告发，检举，执行，经营 | |
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aggregations
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| n.聚集( aggregation的名词复数 )；集成；集结；聚集体 | |
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undertaking
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| n.保证，许诺，事业 | |
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infinity
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| n.无限，无穷，大量 | |
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prone
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| adj.(to)易于…的，很可能…的；俯卧的 | |
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dominant
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| adj.支配的，统治的；占优势的；显性的；n.主因，要素，主要的人(或物)；显性基因 | |
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25
analyzed
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| v.分析( analyze的过去式和过去分词 )；分解；解释；对…进行心理分析 | |
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glorified
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| 美其名的，变荣耀的 | |
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epical
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| adj.叙事诗的，英勇的 | |
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sociologist
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| n.研究社会学的人，社会学家 | |
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29
entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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30
theocracy
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| n.神权政治；僧侣政治 | |
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autocracy
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| n.独裁政治，独裁政府 | |
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32
alluded
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| 提及，暗指( allude的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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scoffed
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| 嘲笑，嘲弄( scoff的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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fully
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| adv.完全地，全部地，彻底地；充分地 | |
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statistical
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| adj.统计的，统计学的 | |
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immediate
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| adj.立即的；直接的，最接近的；紧靠的 | |
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subservient
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| adj.卑屈的，阿谀的 | |
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ethical
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| adj.伦理的，道德的，合乎道德的 | |
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inevitably
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| adv.不可避免地；必然发生地 | |
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40
remains
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| n.剩余物，残留物；遗体，遗迹 | |
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41
considerably
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| adv.极大地；相当大地；在很大程度上 | |
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42
retard
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| n.阻止，延迟；vt.妨碍，延迟，使减速 | |
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astounding
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| adj.使人震惊的vt.使震惊，使大吃一惊astound的现在分词) | |
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44
disappearance
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| n.消失，消散，失踪 | |
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45
extinction
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| n.熄灭，消亡，消灭，灭绝，绝种 | |
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46
intercourse
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| n.性交；交流，交往，交际 | |
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47
watt
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| n.瓦，瓦特 | |
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48
artistic
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| adj.艺术(家)的，美术(家)的；善于艺术创作的 | |
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49
immolated
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| v.宰杀…作祭品( immolate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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50
idol
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| n.偶像，红人，宠儿 | |
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51
advantageous
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| adj.有利的；有帮助的 | |
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52
domain
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| n.(活动等)领域，范围；领地，势力范围 | |
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53
ethics
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| n.伦理学；伦理观，道德标准 | |
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54
opposition
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| n.反对，敌对 | |
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55
theocracies
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| n.神权政治（国家）( theocracy的名词复数 ) | |
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56
humble
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| adj.谦卑的，恭顺的；地位低下的；v.降低，贬低 | |
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Buddhist
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| adj./n.佛教的，佛教徒 | |
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Christian
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| adj.基督教徒的；n.基督教徒 | |
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59
brotherhoods
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| 兄弟关系( brotherhood的名词复数 )； （总称）同行； （宗教性的）兄弟会； 同业公会 | |
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60
primitive
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| adj.原始的；简单的；n.原(始)人，原始事物 | |
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Buddhism
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| n.佛教（教义） | |
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philosophical
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| adj.哲学家的，哲学上的，达观的 | |
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mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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64
equity
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| n.公正，公平，（无固定利息的）股票 | |
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conducive
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| adj.有益的，有助的 | |
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retrace
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| v.折回；追溯，探源 | |
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