said, giving a few examples, "the law of mutual aid has far more importance than the law of mutual struggle."
A year later, Lanessan delivered at Paris a lecture, "The Struggle for Existence and Association for Struggle"; and soon after that Büchner published his work, "Love," in which he showed the importance of sympathy among animals as a step towards developing the first conceptions of morality; but he gave to filial love and compassion too prominent a position, and thereby uselessly limited his field of research.
It was easy for me to give (in "Mutual Aid: а Factor of Evolution") further proof of Kessler's remarkable idea, and to extend it to man. I had only to base my conclusions as regards mutual aid among animals on the accurate observations of Nature by the best field zoologists, and my views on the history of human institutions—on a mass of modern historical research. Among animals, mutual aid is, in fact, not only the most efficacious weapon in the struggle for existence against the hostile forces of Nature and against other inimical species, but it is also the principal instrument of progressive evolution. Even to the otherwise weakest animals it guarantees longevity (and consequently accumulation of experience), security for breeding their offspring, and intellectual progress. This is why those animal species which most practise mutual aid not only better survive in the struggle for life than those which lead an isolated life, but they also occupy a higher position in their own respective classes (of Insects, Birds, or Mammals) by the superiority of their physical structure and their intelligence.
This fundamental fact of Nature was not noticed by Spencer until 1890. He accepted, on the contrary, an acute struggle for life within each species as an established fact which needed no proof—as an axiom. A struggle to the death "with beak and claw" for each bit of food. "Nature stained with the gladiator's blood," such as Tennyson represented it, was his conception of animal life. It was only in 1890 that he began to understand, up to a certain point, the importance of mutual aid, or rather the sentiment of mutual sympathy in the animal world, and began to collect facts and make observations in this direction. But even then, primitive man always remained for him the ferocious beast of his own imagination, which exists only on the condition of seizing the last bit of food from the mouth of its neighbours.
It is evident that once he had adopted a premise as fallacious as this, Spencer could not construct his synthetic philosophy without falling into a series of errors.
