Thus by gradual stages we have passed from four-footed existence into Human Society, and once more I would emphasize the fact that nowhere do we find any breach of continuity, but one factor sets another in operation, which in turn reacts upon the first, and so on in a marvellously harmonious consensus. Surely if there is anywhere in the universe a story matchless for its romantic interest, it is the story of the genesis of Man, now that we are at length beginning to be able to decipher it. We see that there is a good deal more in it than mere natural selection. At bottom, indeed, it is all a process of survival of the fittest, but the secondary agencies we have been considering have brought us to a point where our conception of the Struggle for Life must be enlarged. Out of the manifold compounding and recompounding of primordial clans have come the nations of mankind in various degrees of civilization, but already in the clan we find the ethical process at work. The clan has a code of morals well adapted to the conditions amid which it exists. There is an ethical sentiment in the clan; its members have duties toward it; it punishes sundry acts even with death, and rewards or extols sundry other acts. We are, in short, in an ethical atmosphere, crude and stifling, doubtless, as compared with that of a modern Christian homestead, but still unquestionably ethical. [Illustration] IX _Origin of Moral Ideas and Sentiments_ Now, here at last, in encountering the ethical process at work, have we detected a breach of continuity? Has the moral sentiment been flung in from outside, or is it a natural result of the cosmic process we have been sketching? Clearly it is the latter. There has been no breach of continuity. When the prolongation of infancy produced the clan, there naturally arose reciprocal necessities of behaviour among the members of the clan, its mothers and children, its hunters and warriors. If such reciprocal necessities were to be disregarded the clan would dissolve, and dissolution would be general destruction. For, bear in mind, the clan, when once evolved, becomes the unit whose preservation is henceforth the permanent necessity. It is infancy that has made it so. A miscellaneous horde, with brief infancies for its younger members, may survive a very extensive slaughter; but in a clan, where the proportion of helpless children is much greater, and a considerable division of labour between nurses and warriors has become established, the case is different. An amount or degree of calamity sufficient to break up its organization will usually mean total ruin. Hence, when Nature's travail has at length brought forth the clan, its requirements forthwith become paramount, and each member's conduct from babyhood must conform to them. Natural selection henceforth invests her chief capital in the enterprise of preserving the clan. In that primitive social unit lie all the