Mutual Aid: A Factor of EvolutionKropotkin, Petr Alekseevich, kniaz
Science
Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution
Kropotkin, Petr Alekseevich, kniaz
Cooperation; Social groups; Social institutions
just as human ethics based upon love and personal sympathy only have
contributed to narrow the comprehension of the moral feeling as a whole.
It is not love to my neighbour--whom I often do not know at all--which
induces me to seize a pail of water and to rush towards his house when I
see it on fire; it is a far wider, even though more vague feeling or
instinct of human solidarity and sociability which moves me. So it is
also with animals. It is not love, and not even sympathy (understood in
its proper sense) which induces a herd of ruminants or of horses to form
a ring in order to resist an attack of wolves; not love which induces
wolves to form a pack for hunting; not love which induces kittens or
lambs to play, or a dozen of species of young birds to spend their days
together in the autumn; and it is neither love nor personal sympathy
which induces many thousand fallow-deer scattered over a territory as
large as France to form into a score of separate herds, all marching
towards a given spot, in order to cross there a river. It is a feeling
infinitely wider than love or personal sympathy--an instinct that has
been slowly developed among animals and men in the course of an
extremely long evolution, and which has taught animals and men alike the
force they can borrow from the practice of mutual aid and support, and
the joys they can find in social life.
The importance of this distinction will be easily appreciated by the
student of animal psychology, and the more so by the student of human
ethics. Love, sympathy and self-sacrifice certainly play an immense part
in the progressive development of our moral feelings. But it is not love
and not even sympathy upon which Society is based in mankind. It is the
conscience--be it only at the stage of an instinct--of human solidarity.
It is the unconscious recognition of the force that is borrowed by each
man from the practice of mutual aid; of the close dependency of every
one's happiness upon the happiness of all; and of the sense of justice,
or equity, which brings the individual to consider the rights of every
other individual as equal to his own. Upon this broad and necessary
foundation the still higher moral feelings are developed. But this
subject lies outside the scope of the present work, and I shall only
indicate here a lecture, "Justice and Morality" which I delivered in
reply to Huxley's Ethics, and in which the subject has been treated at
some length.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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