superficially, through their own limited experience; they
knew of history what the annalists, always watchful of wars,
cruelty, and oppression, told of it, and little more besides;
and they concluded that mankind is nothing but a loose
aggregation of beings, always ready to fight with each other,
and only prevented from so doing by the intervention of some
authority.

Hobbes took that position; and while some of his eighteenth-
century followers endeavoured to prove that at no epoch of its
existence--not even in its most primitive condition--mankind
lived in a state of perpetual warfare; that men have been
sociable even in "the state of nature," and that want of know-
ledge, rather than the natural bad inclinations of man, brought
humanity to all the horrors of its early historical life,--his idea
was, on the contrary, that the so-called "state of nature" was
nothing but a permanent fight between individuals, accidentally
huddled together by the mere caprice of their bestial existence.
True, that science has made some progress since Hobbes's time,
and that we have safer ground to stand upon than the specula-
tions of Hobbes or Rousseau. But the Hobbesian philosophy
has plenty of admirers still; and we have had of late quite a
school of writers who, taking possession of Darwin's terminology
rather than of his leading ideas, made of it an argument in
favour of Hobbes's views upon primitive man, and even suc-
ceeded in giving them a scientific appearance. Huxley, as is
known, took the lead of that school, and in a paper written in
1888 he represented primitive men as a sort of tigers or lions,
deprived of all ethical conceptions, fighting out the struggle for
existence to its bitter end, and living a life of "continual free
fight"; to quote his own words--"beyond the limited and
temporary relations of the family, the Hobbesian war of each
against all was the normal state of existence." ¹

It has been remarked more than once that the chief error of
Hobbes, and the eighteenth-century philosophers as well, was
to imagine that mankind began its life in the shape of small
straggling families, something like the "limited and temporary"
families of the bigger carnivores, while in reality it is now
positively known that such was not the case. Of course, we
have no direct evidence as to the modes of life of the first man-
like beings. We are not yet settled even as to the time of their
first appearance, geologists being inclined at present to see their

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