The real needs of men, those the gratification of which is indispensable to the maintenance of life, are few. By experience, and by experience alone, can man learn that present gratification may mean future pain, and so be withheld from such gratification; for only disinclination to one form of pleasure can induce inclination to another form. In the simplicity of primitive social conditions and the uniform character of action under such conditions, rules of experience must have been early formed, which, inherited by succeeding generations, became the rules of conduct.[61] With the development of authority,--first the paternal authority, then that of the family, and finally that of the elders of the tribe,--the possibility of establishing rules of action, and inducing morality, increased. The very nomination of elders, to which primitive authority may almost everywhere be traced, shows how great was the respect for experience. Spencer remarks, in one place in his "Data of Ethics," that human beings first banded themselves together because they found it more advantageous to cooeperate. This is only conditionally true. Before human beings could find association advantageous, they must have accumulated experience of it. That they did this by their own inclination is certainly not true. Wherever we find two solitary beings coming together by chance, enmity is the first feeling excited, and war the result. Everything new, everything unknown, causes aversion, and this aversion must lead to misunderstandings and war the more surely because each of the opponents feels himself disturbed in his supposed right to limitless possession. Human beings must first have warred with one another before they came to the knowledge, not that social life, that is, mutual forbearance, was more advantageous, but that more closely associated individuals gained in power against a common enemy by their association. Man did not choose society, but was, on the contrary, forced into it, for good or evil, through increase of his kind. The discovery of the first tools must have had an immense influence upon increase in the number of individuals, which was before limited by struggle with wild animals, and by the restriction of food to fruit. We must conclude that, under such circumstances, a lasting contract was inevitable, and that, with it, vices suddenly appeared which had before existed only potentially, as predisposition. War or theft must have followed the mutual limitation of rights, but against this disturbance of the peace other members of the society must have banded themselves together. The weaker must soon have been driven from their possessions by the stronger, and must then have united for the purpose of obtaining, by association, what they were unable to acquire otherwise. The growing children settled near their parents, with whom they entered into a family union, in which the father represented the authority. In this arrangement is the germ of civil