strife within, was nevertheless, and precisely for that reason, a life of wonderful progress. The conceptions of Right and Law which prevailed at those stages of civilisation were entirely strange to Spencer: he saw nought but savagery, barbarism and cruelty in that life.
Besides—and this is perhaps even more important—Spencer, like Huxley and so many others, had completely misunderstood the real meaning of the "struggle for existence." He represented it to himself, not only as a struggle between different species of animals (wolves preying upon hares, many kinds of birds living on insects, and so forth), but also as an acute struggle within each species, among all the individuals of the species. In reality, however, such a struggle does not exist—certainly not to the extent imagined by Spencer—even among animals, and still less so among the most primitive savages. But once it was admitted by the philosopher, all his sociological conceptions suffered from that false supposition.
How far Darwin himself was responsible for this erroneous conception of the struggle for existence, we need not discuss here. But it is certain that when he published his "Descent of Man," twelve years after the "Origin of Species," he already took a far broader and a more metaphorical conception of the struggle for existence than that of a hard struggle between all the individuals within each species, which he had taken in his first great work in order to prove the importance of natural selection for the origin of new species. In his second great work, "The Descent of Man," he wrote, on the contrary, that those species which contain the greatest number of mutually sympathetic individuals have the greatest chance of surviving and of leaving a numerous progeny, and thus he entirely upset his first conception of the struggle for life. And nevertheless, Spencer maintained it in full.
The chapters which Darwin gave in "The Descent of Man" to the development of human ethics out of the sociable habits of the animal ancestors of man, might have been the starting-point for working out a conception, exceedingly rich in consequences, of the nature and evolution of human societies (Goethe had already divined it); but these chapters of Darwin passed unnoticed. It was only in 1879, in a lecture given by the zoologist Kessler, that we find a clear conception of the relations existing in Nature between the struggle for existence and mutual aid. "For the progressive evolution of a species," the Russian professor
