III. Biology and History
History is a fragment of biology: the life of man is a portion of the
vicissitudes of organisms on land and sea. Sometimes, wandering alone in
the woods on a summer day, we hear or see the movement of a hundred
species of flying, leaping, creeping, crawling, burrowing things. The
startled animals scurry away at our coming; the birds scatter; the fish
disperse in the brook. Suddenly we perceive to what a perilous minority we
belong on this impartial planet, and for a moment we feel, as these varied
denizens clearly do, that we are passing interlopers in their natural habitat.
Then all the chronicles and achievements of man fall humbly into the
history and perspective of polymorphous life; all our economic
competition, our strife for mates, our hunger and love and grief and war, are
akin to the seeking, mating, striving, and suffering that hide under these
fallen trees or leaves, or in the waters, or on the boughs.
Therefore the laws of biology are the fundamental lessons of history. We
are subject to the processes and trials of evolution, to the struggle for
existence and the survival of the fittest to survive. If some of us seem to
escape the strife or the trials it is because our group protects us; but that
group itself must meet the tests of survival.
So the first biological lesson of history is that life is competition.
Competition is not only the life of trade, it is the trade of life–peaceful
when food abounds, violent when the mouths outrun the food. Animals eat
one another without qualm; civilized men consume one another by due
process of law. Co-operation is real, and increases with social development,
but mostly because it is a tool and form of competition; we co-operate in
our group–our family, community, club, church, party, “race,” or nation–in
order to strengthen our group in its competition with other groups.
Competing groups have the qualities of competing individuals:
acquisitiveness, pugnacity, partisanship, pride. Our states, being ourselves
multiplied, are what we are; they write our natures in bolder type, and do
our good and evil on an elephantine scale. We are acquisitive, greedy, and
