The doctrine of the biological necessity of war may, then, be regarded as open to strong suspicion on theoretical grounds of being contrary to the evolutionary tendency already plainly marked out for the human species. The fact that the nation in which its truth was most generally accepted has been led—and undoubtedly to some extent by it—into a war which can scarcely fail to prove disastrous suggests that in the practical field it is equally fallacious. It may well, therefore, be removed to the lumber-room of speculation and stored among the other pseudo-scientific dogmas of political “biologists”—the facile doctrines of degeneracy, the pragmatic lecturings on national characteristics, on Teutons and Celts, on Latins and Slavs, on pure races and mixed races, and all the other ethnological conceits with which the ignorant have gulled the innocent so long.
IMPERFECTIONS OF THE SOCIAL HABIT IN MAN.
The study of man as a gregarious animal has not been pursued with the thoroughness and objectivity it deserves and must receive if it is to yield its full value in illuminating his status and in the management of society. The explanation of this comparative neglect is to be found in the complex irregularity which obscures the social habit as manifested by man. Thus it comes to be believed that gregariousness is no longer a fully functional and indispensable inheritance, but survives at the present day merely in a vestigial form as an interesting but quite unimportant relic of primitive activities. We have already shown that man is ruled by instinctive impulses just as imperative and just as { 133} characteristically social as those of any other gregarious animal. A further argument that he is to-day as actively and essentially a social animal as ever is furnished by the fact that he suffers from the disadvantages of such an animal to a more marked degree perhaps than any other. In physical matters he owes to his gregariousness and its uncontrolled tendency to the formation of crowded communities with enclosed dwellings, the seriousness of many of his worst diseases, such as tuberculosis, typhus, and plague; there is no evidence that these diseases effect anything but an absolutely indiscriminate destruction, killing the strong and the weakly, the socially useful and the socially useless, with equal readiness, so that they cannot be regarded as even of the least selective value to man. The only other animal which is well known to suffer seriously from disease as a direct consequence of its social habit is the honey bee—as has been demonstrated by recent epidemics of exterminating severity.