The latter
fights out the struggle for existence to the bitter end, like any
other animal; the former devotes his best energies to the object of
setting limits to the struggle.*
In the cycle of phenomena presented by the life of man, the animal, no
more moral end is discernible than in that presented by the lives of
the wolf and of the deer. However imperfect the relics of prehistoric
men may be, the evidence which they afford clearly tends to the
conclusion that, for thousands and thousands of years, before the
origin of the oldest known civilizations, men were savages of a very
low type. They strove with their enemies and their competitors; they
preyed upon things weaker or less cunning than themselves; they were
born, multiplied without stint, and died, for thousands of generations
alongside the mammoth, the urus, the lion, and the hyaena, whose lives
were spent in the same way; [204] and they were no more to be praised
or blamed on moral grounds, than their less erect and more hairy
compatriots.
* [The reader will observe that this is the argument of the
Romanes Lecture, in brief.--1894.]
As among these, so among primitive men, the weakest and stupidest went
to the wall, while the toughest and shrewdest, those who were best
fitted to cope with their circumstances, but not the best in any other
sense, survived.
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