The social life of animals, by W.C. Allee ...

Abstract

ANIMALSfield as elsewhere the long sterile period when Greek philosophy, if known, was dogmatically accepted, and shared with other authoritarian systems the re- sponsibility of explaining the world of reality as well as the universe of fancy.It was not until my own experiments and think- ing and reading had begun to form in my mind a fairly definite pattern that, by the aid of Havelock Ellis's The Dance of Life (43) I stumbled upon the ideas of the third Earl of Shaftesbury, who lived be- fore and after 1700.He seems to have been the first intellectual in the modern period to recognize fairly clearly that nature presents a racial impulse that has regard for others, as well as a drive for individual self-preservation; that, in fact, there are racial drives that go beyond personal advantage, and can only be explained by their advantage to the group.An unfriendly contemporary wrote pretty much these words: "Shaftesbury seems to require and ex- pect goodness in his species as we do a sweet taste in grapes and China oranges, of which, if any are sour, we boldly proclaim that they are not come to their accustomed perfection."Havelock Ellis, in reviewing this development, says that "therewith 'goodness* was seen practically for the first time in the modern period to be as 'natural' as the sweetness of ripe fruit.