Now turn to humanity. I think you will agree with me that right through human history the same two tendencies are observable. The farther back we go, the stronger seems the self-ward tendency. The natural state of uncivilised man is a state of war. Man in primitive communities only exists and flourishes by destroying other communities. A most curious thing it is, too, that apparently our domestic and civic virtues have grown out of this state of war. A man used to carry his wife off by main force. She become his property. He exerted his brute force, he magnified his own personality, as it were, in crushing other personalities. His children were in his hands for life and death. If he afterwards learned to love them, it was in contradistinction to the children that were not his. That which was his, so to speak, gratified his egotism; and, although a more beautiful relationship grew out of it, such was the unpromising beginning. To-day when you hear a man speaking loudly about "_my_ country," or "_my_ family," or "_my_ society," as the case may be, you may be perfectly sure that he is projecting himself into his patriotism, or into his loyalty to family or society; and indeed this was the lowly beginning of what has come to be an excellent virtue. We have had to learn benevolence by concentrating unselfish attention upon the few rather than the many. The farther back you go in history, the sterner does the operation of that law appear, and the less promising the future of mankind. If people tell me the world is not getting better, I suggest that it might be worth their while to read a chapter of mediaeval or primitive history. In the "Odyssey," for instance, Homer sketches for us the career of a strong and remarkable man. His hero, supposed to be a paragon of virtue, is capable of things you would call scoundrelism to-day. He and his band of storm-tossed companions land upon an island of the Grecian Archipelago and find a city there. They promptly sack it and kill all the inhabitants--men, women, and children. It seemed to be the proper thing to do, and found its way into verse, and they boasted about such heroic exploits. It was brutal murder, and the men who were capable of it were nothing more or less than pirates. Yet that stern, terrible tendency thus illustrated is just one with that inscrutable law under which nature herself has come to be what she is. It is what I call the self-ward tendency, the desire to grasp and keep at the expense of other individualities other societies than our own.