Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. THE PRIMITIVE STRUGGLE EXR EXISTENCE. § 5. — If civilization is the outcome of an evolutionary process which began on the levels of animality, it follows that early prehistoric men must once have lived the life of animals. In this chapter we shall try to obtain a clear idea of what that life was. As previously observed, we are able to trace the course of man's life backward through the Age of Metals and the Smooth Stone Period into the time when he used only rough implements of stone and wood. Below this latter point all physical evidence is lacking. Now, it makes no vital difference to the argument of this book whether man began his career on or below the level of the early stone age. But in the interests of clear thinking, it is well for us to push the view backward to a time slightly anterior to that period, and begin with man before he had learned to fashion tools. If it be objected that under such conditions man would not have been distinguished from the higher apes, and would not have been man at all, the answer is that this point is immaterial in the present connection. By carrying the view backward to the extreme limit, and trying to represent to ourselves how a creature like man would have lived in the pre-stone age — by doing this, we are able to set the total results of human progress in bolder relief against the background of nature, and hence to obtain clearer inital conceptions of our subject. The principle to be developed is the same whether we begin with man in the primitive stone age, or in the earlier time that preceded the first era of material progress. § 6. — Great social bodies were impossible in early prehistoric times for at least two good reasons: First — the precarious food supply which is always offered by uncultivated nature; ...