9. Three Faces of Janus

Once upon a time, when things were just getting started in my neighborhood, there was a king named Janus who had a stronghold just a mile or so from my house, up on the hill which we call the Janiculum. This was long before the days of Romulus and Remus, when Rome was just a trading village at a bend in the Tiber. Over in the Aegean the Greeks of the time were having troubles with the Trojans, and since Janus had no Homer, we have no palpable or poetic evidence that he existed at all. I like to think of him, nevertheless, in his citadel up on the hill, for Janus was to become a most remarkable man once he became a god.

The Romans were great ones for cults, and the cult dedicated to Janus must have lasted for better than a thousand years, down at least to the time of Hadrian and the later Empire. His jurisdiction was of an odd sort: he was the god of doorways. This is why we see him as a rule with two faces, for this is how they arranged him over the door, with one face looking into the house, the other out. But beyond this matter of doorways Janus had a larger and more splendid jurisdiction, for he was the god of the beginnings. He was the god of the beginning of the day, and of the beginning of the month, and of the beginning of the year. January was named after him. Janus ruled over the beginning of almost anything, like the laying of an aqueduct's first stone, or the birth of a family's [297] first baby, or the sowing of seed in the first early springtime fields. Romans trusted him, and regularly they climbed the Janiculum's slopes to refresh themselves with his memory. I have a sneaking admiration for a people who cared that much about beginnings, just as I have a sneaking admiration for an old god sitting up on a hill and giving his undiverted attention to the matter.

We live in years of strange grace, as I have said, a time of the second chance when a sword hangs heavily over every head. I do not believe that we are too afraid; perhaps we should be more so. But there is a wisdom in confronting today's problems today -- so long as we confront them -- and leaving tomorrow's until we have all had a good night's sleep. Otherwise we run that risk, so evident in contemporary literature, of sinking back into inertia's despairing pool from which nothing can emerge but low whimpers, sad whines, and finally from somewhere in its dankest depths a few last unremarkable bubbles. In general, however, we seem to remain that youthful species which indeed we are, perhaps overconfident, perhaps a bit insensitive, but certainly unconvinced that one so youthful can die so young. And perhaps it is just as well.

Whatever our fears or our confidences, and however properly or wrongly they may be disposed, I feel a restive-ness in men. It is a dissatisfaction of a universal sort, the special character of no special people. Its outlets are frequently senseless; its displays lack definition. It is unease unaware, demand undeclared, the hunger of a man at midnight who opens the refrigerator door, finds nothing that he really wants, and closing the door goes back to bed. There is a darkening, inward, indefinite mood that retains an outward poise, like that of a box of nitroglycerine at rest.

Perhaps such moods pressed the ancient Romans to climb the Janiculum and there beneath the tall cool pines to seek of an old god young refreshment. And perhaps I can lend to my feeling greater clarity if I recall an incident which occurred in Rome -- and throughout all the world -- just a year or two ago. I refer to the death of John.

Italians have a special attitude towards Popes which they do not extend to the Catholic Church itself. Most of them cannot abide the Church, though they attend it. I live in a part of Rome called Trastevere, which means across the Tiber and was once that trading village at the foot of [298] the old king's hill. The Trasteverini are very poor, very proud, look on all other Romans as immigrants, and so loathe the Church that they vote Communist almost to a "man. Yet even they have a special attitude toward Popes ranging from tolerance to love. John in his lifetime they did not take too seriously: he genuinely amused them, and they responded with genuine affection; since he had once been poor they felt, I believe, a genuine bond with him. Yet nothing can quite explain what happened to the Trasteverini, or for that matter what happened to most of the world's peoples, when the old man was almost gone.

On the night before John died I went over to St. Peter's, which is just around the corner of the Janiculum from my own belligerent neighborhood. Many Trasteverini were there too, as were a good share of all those natives and strangers who happened to be in Rome at the time. We stood together in the immense Piazza di San Pietro enclosed by the curving wings of Bernini's columns. It was not an experience to take lightly, or later to lay aside with ease. The Piazza was almost dark, lighted only by a few street lamps. The Vatican Palace is a square building rising beyond the curve of the columns. It was dark. One light burned. It was in a room with an open window on the top floor next to the room where John lay dying.

Contrary to those reports published widely abroad, it was not a religious experience. Few knelt. I have since suspected that those photographs of kneeling little boys which appeared in the world press were in fact of little boys hired by photographers to provide suitable models for the occasion. But there was a silence quite unbelievable in Italy. It was as if the noyau had gone out of business for the time being. Nobody smoked. Despite the tens of thousands gathered in the Piazza, nobody jostled anyone. If somebody brushed against you by accident, he apologized in a low voice. The throng stood in shadowed, tight little knots, watching the lighted window, all with heads slightly tilted. What they were doing was listening to muted transistor radios, in the hands of others, relaying the most recent reports coming from the dying Pope's doctors.

I lingered, I lingered. I could not go home. I found myself gripped by an absurd emotion, one as pure as any I had ever known, and I believe that it differed little from that experienced by Catholics, even the most devout: I could not bring myself to go away and leave the old man to die [299] by himself. If it was a religious experience that united us, that quelled even the noyau, then it was an experience of pagan order. We were citizens of most ancient days who had climbed the Janiculum. John, that dying king, had in his long, last, agonizing hours become consecrated throughout almost all the world as our god of the beginnings.

The death of a Pope or even of a president may unite the world in grief or shock. The union may last for but hours or days, yet brief though its stay may be, we cannot ignore it. The union transcends all boundaries, all seas, all ranges of mountains however high. The union ignores religious convictions and religious denials, the parochial sentiments of territory, the mathematics of amity-enmity, all social and racial antagonisms, the aspirations or frustration of status. One might suggest that the final hazard of death becomes real to all men and makes them, if only for the moment, one. Yet while this may be a portion of the answer, it does not satisfy me, for we tend to discover our hunger for these men only after they are gone.

And what is that hunger? What is this visceral need so desperate that it unites even enemies? I do not know. But as we finish this inquiry which for so long has absorbed us, let us ask three questions which have no answers, and all of which relate to beginnings.

Someday, I predict, a symposium will be convened somewhere, and to it will be invited not only men of all the sciences, but men of the cloth and of philosophy as well, and perhaps even an artist or two. The conference may well not occur within our lifetimes, but occur someday it must. And its subject will be First Causes.

Two recent events, one in the physical sciences and the other in the biological, have raised signposts painted in particularly brilliant colors, and both point toward a someday convention of minds. The most recent occurred on the evening of September 6, 1965, when at Cambridge in an address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science the great astronomer Fred Hovle abandoned his steady-state theory of the universe. As so often happens when lightning bolts split the scientific sky, the thunder takes a long time coming. It has not yet truly begun to roll. [300]

Some twenty years ago Hoyle and several associates put forward the entirely rational proposal that the universe has always existed and will always exist more or less as it is today. It continually expands. Galaxies of stars like our own, which we call the Milky Way, move ever farther apart from their neighbors. But as voids open, new stars, new galaxies condense from far-spread clouds of gas to enter the spaces between. Time and matter as we know them are truly infinite. And the world of which our earth is a fraction so small has been a world without beginning, as it is a world without end.

The steady-state theory, then with evidence in plenty, was one of comfort as infinite to the rational mind. The inexplicable bowed before the ineradicable. Laws of sci- ' ence might be modified, amended, even repealed in favor | of new laws. Science itself, however, rested on that most absolute of foundations, absolute infinity. But then came radio astronomy, a new technique through which giant antennae discover and explore distant stellar objects by 1 means of the radio waves which they give forth. And with radio astronomy came Martin Ryle, and the big bang.

Ryle proposed that, far from our world's being one with neither beginning nor end, the universe as we know it had originated little over ten billion years ago (a little longer ago, in other words, than twice the age of the earth itself) with an enormous explosion. Before that date, all existing matter had been packed into a solid mass of a density which we need not discuss since we cannot conceive of it. Then an explosion had occurred of a magnitude which likewise we need not discuss since we cannot conceive of it, either. But as you and I step out on a roof or a grassy hill, and we allow our imaginations to wander freely among those starry reaches of perpetual wonderment, then if Ryle is correct we wander among fragments of that ancient cataclysm which created all things that are.

The names of Ryle and Hoyle were reminiscent of some I oldtime team of vaudeville hoofers, and Big-Bang vs. Steady-State added small solemnity to the famous con- % troversy. The implications were sobering indeed, for the layman almost as incalculable as the astronomers' equations. Should Ryle be proved right, and the Creation placed at a finite position in the continuum of space and time, then all the fading arguments of metaphysical tradition I would receive as from some unexpected oxygen tent new [301] breath; and the otherwise impenetrable laws of science, founded on the eternal dimensions of infinity itself, would like a maze of man-made dikes and levees broached at a point of singular flaw, vanish in the omnipotent flood of ancient, imponderable waters. But you could no more take Ryle seriously than you could accept as literal argument the opening statements of a scriptural Genesis.

Then came 1960. In that year the techniques of visual and radio astronomy were combined to reveal a queer object in our skies: so distant it was that billions of years had elapsed since the light we observed had actually been brought forth; we observed the past. Yet as its light was dim its energy was enormous, and its energy was that of an object in precipitous flight. It was not a star; it was not a galaxy: we spoke of it as a quasi-stellar object, a phrase which quickly became contracted to quasar. And as more and more quasars were discovered in the space beyond ultimate space, fleeing at speeds approaching the ultimate speed of light itself, a terrifying possibility presented itself like a ragged stranger at the doors of our cosmologists: Ryle could be right. The quasars behaved in accordance with his equations: here were the farthest projectiles cast out by the original explosion, the primal objects of a primal moment, sifted and softened by that laggard, time. So far were the farthest, so long had their light taken to reach us, that what we were looking at, closer and ever more closely, was the Creation itself.

The heavens enclose us, yet beckon. As we stand on our hill, the stars imprison yet free us. As Homo sapiens is an incident in the history of organic being, so organic being becomes an accident, perhaps a prevalent accident, in the history of matter, time, and energy. We exist; we are here. Let probability defy or support us, it but enhances our role; let the accident of stars deny us, yet as stars remain, so likewise do we; let First Cause, imperturbable, neglect our statistical presence: still we are here, in triumph or in tribulation, in divine accordance or desperate anomaly, asserting our existence in that fugitive cosmos of which we are a part.

It was against such a philosophical backdrop that there had emerged those vaudevillean hoofers Ryle & Hoyle in an act called Big-Bang vs. Steady-State. Things move rapidly these days. Observations of quasars multiplied, and five years in our observatories was enough. Fred [302] Hoyle appeared at Cambridge to give his audience a summary of evidences for his own version of a logical, rational, self-perpetuating cosmos and for Ryle's illogical, irrational, inexplicable condition of things. And with an integrity that one expects of science yet too infrequently encounters, he surrendered: "From the data that I have presented here it seems likely that the idea will now have to be discarded, at any rate in the form that has become widely known -- the steady-state universe."

Various alternatives are today emerging which attempt to preserve some kind of order -- an oscillating universe, for example, which explodes, expands, and in enormous cycle falls in on itself to explode and expand again. But ■ the alternatives are little more than scientific rationalizations, thumbs in the bursting cosmic dike. With the triumph of Martin Ryle has reappeared -- not from the altar or the cloistered cell but from the observatories and laboratories of science itself -- the problem of First Causes. And it cannot be banished from future thought.

Into biology too, simultaneously and independently, has emerged that old ghost of human preoccupation. I have twice in these pages referred to American experiments with the pjanarian worm: to its sense of assurance in a familiar place, and to its capacity to know what time it is. Although the evidence mounts that this simple being stores its memories in molecular lockers which may be transferred from one creature to another, I shall still avoid that most i controversial of laboratory* conclusions both because I believe it incompletely demonstrated and because it is inappropriate to our present reflections. The planarian's capacity to learn, however, is neither. It has been demon- j strated, and demonstrated brilliantly; and with the demonstration the ghost of First Causes walks again within our \ walls.

Let us remind ourselves: the glanarian worm is an aquatic creature so primitive in the evolutionary scale that it lacks a true central nervous system, possesses a brain consisting of nothing but two enlarged ganglia connecting | its two lateral nerves, lacks a stomach or rectum or anything resembling a modern digestive system, and while \ capable of laying an egg is equally capable of dividing itself in two and growing a new head on the front of its old rear section. Since it can grow that head in six days, we may j safely assume that the planarian's brain is an organ of no [303] great planarian concern. And we may also assume that had the planarian worm been a creature of natural invention at any time in the last half billion years, it would have incorporated into its old-fashioned architecture a modern gadget or two. It therefore seems likely that the creature is a leftover from those hazy pre-Cambrian days of evolving life about which we know so little. But when we say that, we talk of ages belonging to the same time scale as that which absorbs the cosmologist. When we look at the planarian we are looking back into the history of life, just as when we observe a quasar we are looking back into the history of all things.

Jay Boyd Best and his colleague Irvin. Rubinstein began their Washington experiments with the pjanarian in 1958. Their initial interest was to discover just how much such an all-but-brainless being could be taught. Most learning-and-memory experiments with the planarian have had a weakness, that the learning has been a matter of inducing a conditioned reflex, the all-purpose tool in the kit of most American psychologists. But this kind of learning, called "classical conditioning," is losing ground among our more advanced observers of behavior. What intrigued Best was that higher accommodation called "instrumental learning" by which, in pursuit of a desirable goal involving choice of actions, one learns to choose the right path and reject the wrong. A creature as simple as the planarian worm might conceivably be "taught" by electric shock a reflex to avoid this and accept that. But could this primitive being lacking sex, rectum, circulatory system, a modern nervous hookup, a brain that could not be regrown in a few days, learn to choose between the rewarding and the unrewarding? And if so, what was he choosing with?

It took little effort for Best and Rubinstein to demonstrate that the worm could not only learn to choose, but could learn with dismaying aptitude. They constructed a plastic maze, a simple device with a Y-shaped channel connecting three wells. A worm would be placed in one well of the flooded maze, then the water would be drained out. Since the planarian cannot long survive in a dry condition, he would crawl out of the well into his tunnel in search of water. But the Y-shaped tunnel forked. The worm faced two choices. Now the observers would brightly light the well at the end of one branch of the fork and [304] leave the other in darkness. If the worm chose the lighted well, the maze would be instantly flooded as a reward.

A training session for a worm consisted of ten or fifteen trials, and sessions were held every other day. To take account of any innate preference for light or dark, half of the worms were trained to seek the bright well for water, half the darkened. To eliminate any directional prejudices based on right and left, which well to be illuminated was determined by chance. At the first day's session all worms chose by chance; success or failure was fifty-fifty. But even at the second session preferences developed; those being trained to move toward light did so more often than toward dark; those being trained to move toward dark did so more often than toward light. By the third session -- a speed of learning difficult to believe -- most worms hit their peaks and chose correctly four times out of five. Then came out of nowhere the incredible collapse.

It is at this moment that we, like the observers, enter the haunted house of psychological beginnings. Almost without exception every planarian worm, once he attained a success of about 80 percent, began choosing the wrong road in preference to the right. That he "knew" what he was doing was inarguable. Had he simply forgotten his lessons, he would have relapsed to the fifty-fifty original score, determined by chance. But he did not. He dropped to one out of three. He was discriminating against the right choice.

Best describes himself and his colleague as being appalled. They must have been. It is a great enough mystery that such a creature could learn anything. It is an accomplishment defying one's understanding that he could learn so rapidly. But that on the verge of total success the planarian worms should uniformly embrace perversity lies entirely beyond explanation. And to make matters worse, further trials brought rejection not only of the right answer, but of the experiment itself. When the maze went dry the worms curled up, refused to go anywhere, and in arrant rebellion opted for inevitable death in preference to further learning.

The harried investigators, faced by the organic equivalent of apples falling upward and straight lines turning corners, bumbled about trying to find means of appeasing their tiny rebels, who by now had taken charge of the [305] experiment. Perhaps there was something about the kind of plastic used in molding the maze that made worms unhappy. They found other materials. The worms remained unmoved. Perhaps the mere threat of death in a drought was not enough and the worms were on strike for inexpressible fringe benefits. The scientists added that supreme planarian delicacy, finely chopped liver, to the water in the wells which they were supposed to crawl to. The worms remained adamant, muttering some planarian equivalent of "The hell with it." By this point in the experiment it was not the mentality of worms being tested but the sanity of scientists, and hysteria hovered close by. When somebody wondered if the worms might be suffering from claustrophobia, hysteria seemed, in truth, to have closed in. Another maze was built. It offered not merely water-filled wells to save worm life but a new spaciousness at worm's end, a sense of freedom and elbow room where a worm could feel like a worm. And lo! it worked. It had been claustrophobia. The worms co-operated.

Any scientist in his right mind would with this climax assume that he had seen everything. But by now both Best and Rubinstein had long since lost touch with their right minds. They became infatuated with the possibility that worms who could suffer from claustrophobia might also have suffered boredom from a lesson so easily mastered. Fortunately for the future of psychology there was no one present to point out to the two mad scientists that a creature lacking proper brain, proper nervous system, proper belly, proper sex life, and even proper rectum has nothing under the sun to get bored with. Since no one was looking, they constructed another maze, an exact duplicate of the original, but made of rough plastic instead of smooth.

Now they started the experiment all over again. They used the smooth maze as before. They trained their worms to head for brightened or darkened wells, each as loaded with claustrophobia as the wells had been in the first place. Predictably, when the worms hit a level of 80 percent success they promptly went into a decline and started choosing wrong answers. But now the scientists clapped them in the maze that would feel rough on their undersides as they crawled along. From that day on, half of the trials were conducted in the smooth maze, half in the [306] rough. A worm had to learn that if he felt smooth plastic against his undersides he must head for the light to reach water, but if he found himself crawling over rough plastic then to gain water he must head for the dark. In the testing of monkeys and children this is known as a double-ambiguity problem.

One out of every three planarian worms mastered the double-ambiguity problem. Sometimes when they reached the fork they would hesitate, pointing their heads first one way then the other, as if trying to make up their "minds." In animal study this is known as "vicarious trial-and-error behavior." Sometimes, unable to make up their "minds," they would go back to the starting point and begin again. But of the one out of every three who succeeded in mastering the whole problem, none ever grew bored again. None ever showed perversity, none ever rebelled, none ever curled up in tight defiance or muttered, grimly, the hell with it.

Where are we? What forces do we behold when we inspect the mind of worm or man? What is this everlasting scenery that graces our stages? What are these staircases that life has always climbed? What are these beds that life has always slept in, these antique furnishings that seem forever to have been life's own?

We do not know. Our ignorance of the human being is as massive and as measurable as our ignorance of the planarian worm. We are equivalent mysteries, and the man who says otherwise is the supreme ignoramus among us. Best wrote:

If one finds that planarian behavior resembles behavior that in higher animals one calls boredom, interest, conflict, decision, frustration, rebellion, anxiety, learning and cognitive awareness, is it permissible to say that planarians also display these attributes? . . . Suppose the apparent similarity between the protopsychological patterns of planarians and the psychological patterns of rats and men turns out to be more than superficial. This would indicate that psychological characteristics are more ancient and widespread than the neurophysiological structures from which they are thought to have arisen. . . . Two possibilities suggest themselves. Such patterns may stem from some primordial properties of living matter, [307] arising from some cellular or subcellular level of organization rather than nerve circuitry. . . . An alternative possibility is that the behavioral programs may have arisen independently in various species by a kind of convergent evolution. In other words, the psychology of animals may evolve in response to compelling considerations of optimal design in the same way that whales and other cetacean mammals have evolved a fishlike shape. Both possibilities seem likely and do not exclude each other.

Whether we gaze upon worms or we gaze upon stars, the most informed of our scientists press on our wonderment the old, old problem of First Causes. We are all of a piece, of this we may be sure, the most distant, fugitive quasar, the most ancient, lingering worm. But what of our beginnings? It is the first of the questions for which we have no answers, and for this one I doubt that we ever shall. What is good is the prospect that out of knowledge rather than ignorance men may someday again ask the question together; that one day we shall meet on the Janiculum, and wonder as one beneath the tall cool pines.

There is another question concerning beginnings of more immediate, practical, day-to-day importance to our lives; and perhaps it is just as unanswerable. Behavior is a cart, not a horse; it is a consequence, not a cause; it is an end, not a beginning. Behavior is what we do, not why we do it. We may speculate reasonably about selective value and survival necessity, and since the evolutionary process will inform us someday as to how things came out, we speculate properly. But such information will come to us as hindsight, when perhaps we are all nicely extinct, and so offers us today the most debatable compass. If means of prediction are to lie within our grasp, then we must speak of beginnings, not ends.

Why do men and other animals act as we do? Why do' individuals of a given species favor this behavior pattern, reject that? Why does a howling monkey defend a social territory while the langur does not? We may trace the evolutionary history of a species, granted that materials [308] for study are available, and come to reasonable conclusions. But they are still conclusions concerning consequence of behavior, not cause. And if ethological study is to supply us with a guidepost or two along our way, then we must come to some clearer conception of motive, of beginnings. Why do men act as they do?

The question is unanswerable in whole, and perhaps even in part. But I shall dare to make a suggestion which must be taken for precisely what it is, a hypothesis, not an answer. And to begin with let me return to certain thoughts inspired by Frank Fraser Darling's remarks on territory and recorded in an earlier chapter;

It was Darling's conclusion, we may recall, that motivation for territory is psychological, not physiological, that it arises from twin needs in the animal for security and stimulation, and that it is satisfied by the territorial heartland and the territorial periphery. I added to that my own speculation that identity is another animal need which territory satisfies, identification with a unique fragment of something larger and more permanent than the animal itself, a place, whether social or geographical, his and his alone. But we were speaking exclusively of animals other than man. Now let me extend the thought.

I suggest that there are three beginnings -- three faces of Janus-r-psychologically motivating the behavior of all higher animals including man. They are these same needs for identity, for stimulation, and for security. How low and how ancient they may be evidenced in the evolutionary scale we have no means as yet to guess. For all we know, they may be the primordial psychological necessities of life itself. Let us restrain ourselves now to the suggestion that they are the inward and frequently conflicting [309] impulses lending both unity to the behavior of higher beings and continuity to the higher evolutionary processes. They provide the final refutation of human uniqueness.

I am grateful to the American psychologist Abraham Maslow for the concept which he first presented to describe needs universal to a species. He used the phrase "instinctoid needs." I find difficulty with the word "instinctoid," which for some reason or other presents me with the immediate need for either a surgeon or a bottle of Worcestershire sauce. It is an entirely personal affliction, and both Dr. Maslow and the reader must forgive me if I use the term no further. Maslow's thesis stemmed from his radical approach to psychology, the analysis of healthy people. To find out what was wrong with us, his was the heretical impulse to find out what was right with us. He assumed that just as the lack of a needed vitamin will spread disorder through the body, so the starvation of a basic psychological need will spread disorder through mind and emotion. Only through the study of healthy personalities, who through a variety of means have found satisfaction for basic needs, can one discover what the needs consist of.

As a psychologist, Maslow confined his observations to the human being and so came up with answers different from mine. He regarded love, for example, as an instinctlike human need. I should regard it not as a human need but a human answer, satisfying demands of an older and wider order. As specific patterns originating in the evolutionary past characterize the behavior of four-dimensional man, so the more general psychological needs which they serve have seen their beginnings in the time before man was born.

Identity, stimulation, security: if again you will think of them in terms of their opposites their images will be sharpened. Identity is the opposite of anonymity. Stimulation is the opposite of boredom. Security is the opposite of anxiety. We shun anonymity, dread boredom, seek to dispel anxiety. We grasp at identification, yearn for stimulation, conserve or gain security. And brood though I may over Janus' three faces, I have yet to discover a fourth.

The extent of a given need, of course, will vary from species to species, population to population, group to group, individual to individual. The need for security must be greater in prey animals than in predators, in the female [310] than in the male, in the ill than in the well, in the un-propertied than in the propertied, in the omega fish than in the alpha, in the unstable society than in the stable. It is characteristic of an innate need, however, that it is never absent, and never more than temporarily satisfied. Like a vitamin, there must be a daily dose.

Also, there is a definite hierarchy of value among the three needs. Some needs are more pressing than others, and these too must vary from species to species, individual to individual. But curiously enough there is not the variation that one might expect. There are few exceptions to the rule that the need for identity is the most powerful and the most pervasive among all species. The need for stimulation is not far behind. And security, normally, will be sacrificed for either of the other two.

A behavior pattern or a cultural tradition is successful if it satisfies a maximum of innate need. Human war, for example, has been the most successful of all our cultural traditions because it satisfies all three basic needs. Our struggle for identity is the endless quest to achieve recognition of oneself as an individual in one's own eyes and the eyes of one's kind. War provides glory for some, the ultimate identity in the eyes of a maximum number. But the dread of anonymity does not imply a necessary tussle for fame; it is a tussle for recognition, even self-recognition, for knowing who one is. Rank satisfies identity. In a subtle fashion, war provides identity for all, from commanding general to private,. through squads and companies, regiments and divisions, functional association with air or infantry or naval disposal, artillery, communications, supply, a thousand satisfying pigeonholes. All are identifications which the anonymity of civilian life can less successfully provide.

The stimulation of warfare is the most powerful produced ever in the history of species. The flight from boredom has never been presented with such maximum satisfactions for maximum numbers. No philosopher, viewing the horrors of war through the astigmatic lenses of the pain-pleasure principle, can grasp the attraction which war presents to civilized men. It is the ultimate release from the boredom of normal existence. This was what William James so well understood when he wrote that a permanent peace economy can never be based on a pleasure economy. Pain may be far more stimulating than pleasure; death and [311] disaster may present hypodermic charges more potent than life at its fullest, success at its most resounding. In all the rich catalogue of human hypocrisy it is difficult to find anything to compare with that dainty of dainties, that sugared delicacy, the belief that people do not like war.

Finally, there is the need for security. The rewards are equivalent. The predator fights for a net gain in security, whether in loot, land, slaves, or the confusion of enemies. The defender, on the other hand, fights to conserve security, and to destroy those forces that threaten it. A certain local anxiety may be generated, the anxiety of mothers and wives. But it is a small force as compared to the anxiety of losing the war itself.

War has suffered few sacrifices of appeal in this century. As it has gained in size and techniques of terror, it has gained in stimulation. As it has gained in participating numbers, it has gained in identification. The only real loss has been to the security of the predator through the rise of the organized territorial nation, and to the suicidal consequences of nuclear argument. While general warfare has in our time become something too fissionably hot to handle, the result has been not so much to reduce war's basic appeal as to introduce frustration into our lives; we are denied what we want. Under a pax atomica, a program for peace which does not include substitute satisfactions for those basic, innate needs satisfied in past times by our most popular diversion is a program of controversial validity.

As we may understand the popularity of human war, we may understand the popularity of territory. There are few institutions, animal or human, that satisfy all three needs at once. Besides the security and the stimulation of borde.r quarrels which it provides with equivalent largesse among species, it provides identity. "This place is mine; I am of this place," says the albatross, the patas monkey, the green sunfish, the Spaniard, the great horned owl, the wolf, the Venetian, the prairie dog, the three-spined stickleback, the Scotsman, the skua, the man from La Crosse, Wisconsin, the Alsatian, the little-ringed plover, the Argentine, the lungfish, the lion, the Chinook salmon, the Parisian. I am of this place which is different from and superior to all other places on earth and I partake of its identity so that I too am both different and superior, and it is something that you cannot take away from me despite all afflictions which [312] I may suffer or where I may go or where I may die. I shall 1 remain always and uniquely of this place.

I can discover no argument of objective worth which can effectively counter the claim that the psychological relationship of a lungfish to a piece of muddy water differs in any degree from the psychological relationship of the San Franciscan to the hills and the bay that he loves so well. Several hundred million years of biological evolution have altered not at all the psychological tie between proprietor and property. Neither have those unimaginable epochs of evolutionary time altered the psychological stimulation which enhances the physiological energies of the challenged proprietor. Nor have we reason to believe that the sense of security spreading ease through a troop of black lemurs in their heartland has changed a least whit throughout all of primate history in its effect on the sailor, home from the sea, or the businessman, home from the office.

War may be the most permanent, the most changeless, the most prevalent, and thus the most successful of our cultural innovations, but the reasons differ not at all from the prevalent success of territory. Both satisfy all three basic needs. And we have few other institutions to rival them.

Let us glance at love. In its ideal form, love also satisfies all three needs. It provides identity, that intense recognition in the eyes of a loved one that there is no one quite like oneself. It provides stimulation, in the love of adults, through the slam of the heart, the tensions of desire, the consummations of the bed. And it provides security to varying degrees in the varying probabilities that the satisfactions of today will be the satisfactions of tomorrow. Yet the tales of the poets confirm the tragic contradictions of our innate needs. The structure of security is the birthplace of boredom. It is love's aching vulnerability. Sexual stimulation in the hands of a resourceful couple may make of love a device animated by perpetual motion; but it does not happen often. As the history of war is in large part the story of peoples who will risk all for release from boredom, so the history of adultery is in large part the story of individuals who will risk everything of apparent worth for a brief exploration of distant coasts, however paltry.

The tragic tales of the poets confirm more than the vulnerability of love; they confirm the vulnerability of security itself. That it ranks so low in the hierarchy of need [313] is of little wonder, since the more it is satisfied the more it goads our flight from boredom, our dread of anonymity. There is some minimum need for security, without doubt, since lacking sufficient satisfaction we are consumed and immobilized by anxiety. Yet unlike the need for identity and the need for stimulation, both of which are insatiable, the need for security quickly comes to self-defeat and provides nothing but increased hunger for those demands which in the end may leave security again a bankrupt.

Perhaps it is all a part of some vital dynamics. Perhaps the contradictions of innate needs offer guarantee that life will not stand still. Perhaps in the grand psychology of being the quest for identity is nothing more than an individual realization of the demand for variation placed by evolution on animate life. Perhaps the demand for stimulation is the compulsion to compete, without which natural selection could not exist. Perhaps the limitation placed on our need for security rests on the role of the population as an evolutionary unit, in which the fate of individuals has limited significance. All is speculation, but should the relation of our innate needs to evolution be demonstrable, then one might understand why from animate beginnings they have been bound up with the processes of life itself.

What is evident without too great speculation is how few are the behavioral outlets which satisfy all three needs. War has been one, territory is another, and there is sometimes love. There is another, I believe, which, since we have not yet investigated it, we cannot enlarge upon: The social invention, which supplies identity on two levels through one's membership in a society and one's rank within it; which supplies stimulation on two levels through the competitions of societies as groups and the competitions of individuals for dominant positions within the group; and which provides security on two levels, the stability of the group and the stability of one's rank within the hierarchy. But few are the behavioral patterns or cultural traditions which satisfy more than a fraction of our needs. Alcohol, that time-tested nourishment, may provide stimulation and heroic identification in our own eyes; in the eyes of others, however, we are a drunk, and security is threatened besides. Crime is likewise an old institution offering immense reward for our needs of identity and stimulation and, granted sufficient social tolerance or indifference, may even gain a measure of security as well. [314]

In general, however, our means of satisfying innate needs are precious few, and the sacrifice of any must mean replacement by another. We may agree, for example, that the smoking of cigarettes is dangerous to health; yet unless we provide alternative stimulation, we shall have little luck stamping out the addiction through appeal to security, weakest of all needs. We may agree, for example, that our societies must provide greater security for the individual; yet if all we succeed in producing is a social structure providing increased anonymity and ever increasing boredom, then we should not wonder if ingenious man turns to such amusements as drugs, housebreaking, vandalism, mayhem, riots, or, at the most harmless, strange haircuts, costumes, standards of cleanliness, and sexual experiments. He is achieving identity otherwise denied him, discovering excitements socially unavailable.

We face in the elimination of war this most fundamental of psychological problems. For almost as long as civilization has been with us, war has represented our most satisfactory means of at once escaping anonymity and boredom while preserving or gaining a measure of security. It has been the all-purpose answer to our innate needs. Now advancing technology may force us to abandon the diversions of warfare; but we cannot discard from human expression an institution so outrageously satisfying without discovering and encouraging substitute outlets. However we choose to state the challenge: as a necessity to nourish our needs so that we shall not fight; or, since we cannot fight, to discover other satisfactions so that we shall not starve: whatever may be our approach, the challenge to human ingenuity remains the same.

That challenge is being met by ethology on two different fronts which are probably one and the same. There is the approach of Konrad Lorenz, with its emphasis on the individual and on the practicality as well as the necessity for the ritualization of aggression. I discussed this briefly in the last chapter as evolution's normal mode of accepting aggressiveness as healthy and essential to animate beings, but providing for it a host of means whereby anatomical or behavioral mechanisms discourage lethal outcome. The vervet monkey has a tiny white line just over its eyelids, invisible except when he lifts his eyebrows in a gesture of threat; the sight of the white line discourages further hostilities. The dog wags its tail as a signal of friendly [315] intentions, and dogs understand; the cat wags her tail as a gesture of unfriendly intentions, and cats understand. The baboon has canine teeth like Florentine daggers, deadly to leopards and fellow baboons alike; but for his fellows he need only throw back his head to exhibit his dental wonders, and it is usually enough.

The pressure of natural selection, we might say, rides with human survival and not against it. We may well complain, "But man is a hunter, and what of that killing propensity within us?" The wolf, however, is a hunter and a killer with an inheritance older than our own; and when wolves indulge in final debate, the loser rolls over on his back, exposing his belly to the victor; the winner, incapable of attacking him further, walks away. It is a behavioral gesture in no wise different from the human gesture of raising one's hand in surrender.

We cannot proceed too far into the ordered parklands of animal example, or we shall be guilty of taking trends out of windows, and of placing human faith in human potentialities which do not exist. But since evolutionary command proceeds on an unconscious, not conscious, level, it is an appropriate moment to recall Anthony Storr's suggestion to the London symposium that "the space race has been a ritualization of the cold war. Should this be true -- and I accept it intuitively as true -- then a phenomenon lacking any possible practical explanation finds its motivation in the secret recesses of evolutionary motivation. Frustrated in our warlike rivalries for power, the Soviet Union and the United States of America have joined in a ritual as expensive as war itself. Identity with one side or the other and stimulations of the most imaginative of competitions receive infinite satisfaction. Yet the security of the species is subjected to no threat beyond the expendability of a hero or two. That the human populations involved have borne with cheer the most improvident of costs for the most implausible of economic returns testifies to the validity of the human demands rewarded. That the ritualization has been unconscious -- that, in other words, we have not had a rational clue as to what we were doing -- is confirmed by the general astonishment at Storr's explanation. And that the human being, for all his rational uniqueness, could surrender himself to a procedure so rooted in the unthinking evaluations of natural selection is the most hopeful omen [316] for the human future which modern history has so far produced.

Lorenz' preoccupation with ritualization which, while accepting the virtues of aggression, looks for means to contain its vices has approached the challenge largely from the viewpoint of the individual. V. C. Wynne-Edwards, on the other hand, has tended to accept the perspective of society. I have suggested that we put his definition of society out into the sun to ripen for a while; let us bring it in: "A society can be defined as a group of individuals competing for conventional prizes by conventional means."

Wynne-Edwards' definition may be interpreted in Lorenz' terms, as a means of ritualizing the natural and necessary rivalries of man; or it may be interpreted in my own terms, as an institution providing for its members identity and stimulation without undue sacrifice of security. A properly constituted society is therefore a natural society -- a society in accord with evolutionary principles -- which provides for all its members the stimulation of rivalry for the prizes of identity by means of fair competition governed by accepted rules and regulations. The more open be the rivalry, the more worthy the prizes, the more fair and accepted the rules of competition, the more successful will be the society and the more satisfied the innate needs of its members.

Human history offers few examples of such openness of I rivalry, such worthiness of prize, or such fairness of com- I petition. The definition might be dismissed as Utopian were I it not for a single exception. For all our efforts to enclose competition within such boundaries as caste, for all our successful ambitions to load the dice of fair competition, | for all our sentimental education of recent decades which j has attempted to demean competition itself, one human activity has resisted our best efforts, that of the athlete, i Never have we regarded him as anything but a natural animal. None has pretended that his aggressiveness is I learned. No one has offered him less than the most profuse I of conventional prizes. And in no field of human activity have the rules of the game been more strictly enforced, or more willingly accepted.

Since the time of the first Olympic games, twenty-seven centuries ago, ethics and aggression have been the heads and tails of sport. The respectability of rivalry has in a [317] sense generated and compelled the morality -- the ritualization -- of rivalry's rules and regulations. The cheat occurs, of course, and is the immediate subject of headlines. Lapse of ethics may overcome an entire sport; it will cause the prompt dismissal of that sport as unworthy of popular attention. So rare indeed is the cry of counterfeit in sports of international attention that it becomes overnight the scandal of nations. But the morality of sport has little to do with the pressure of public opinion; it is the innate demand of that innate aggressor, the athlete.

Storr's interpretation of the space race as being unconsciously motivated is hopeful; so likewise is the athlete's willingness -- no, far more, innate capacity -- for accepting and learning the rules of the game. Russians and Americans without propaganda or doctoral degrees in the theory and practice of ritualization have accepted the cost of the space race with enthusiasm; and so the athlete, that respectable aggressor, accepts and absorbs the rules and regulations of his sport without, in many cases, benefit of a registerable IQ. The open human aggressive instinct, unfrustrated by social disapproval, sucks up like a vacuum cleaner the most minute particles of learning to complete its pattern. Whether the athlete has mental capacities to rattle about in the interior of a thimble or to strain the capacities of a ten-gallon hat, he will learn with equal facility complexities of plays, subtleties of movement, intricacies of rules and regulations to baffle an Einstein. There is no mind within the normal range of Homo sapiens which cannot grasp the most complex rules of an athletic competition, as there are few spirits unwilling to abide by the conventions so long as society guarantees that the conventions will be observed by all.

Here in the world of the athlete is Wynne-Edwards' group of individuals competing for conventional prizes by conventional means. As in the world of the animal, aggression is recognized, encouraged, channeled, and by innate acceptance restrained within the bounds of danger. It is then possible to believe that human energies can be so satisfied only on the baseball diamond, the hockey rink, the football field, the runner's track? Were we to reverse our attitudes toward competition and aggression, to recognize and encourage them in all paths of life, to accept as a prime social obligation the guarantee that competition will be open to all social partners and that the conventions will [318] be defied by none, is it impossible to believe that our innate needs for identity, stimulation, and a degree of security lie within human fulfillment?

Civilization already presents us with our putting greens and our stamping grounds, our offices and our factories, our mines and plowed fields, our artists' studios, our scholars' studies, our green recesses of nature where men may meditate, our high stairways of oratory where men may act, our dark alleyways where aggression uncontained asserts its most ferocious practicalities, the sunniness of our campuses where the most impractical of visions may be pursued in full play, our stations of the cross where some may explore one devotion, our carpeted mosques where some follow another, our halls for performance, our markets for trading, our accepted haunts for the opposition of beaks, our traditional grounds for the confrontation of noses. Civilization lacks nothing in its imitation of nature; what it lacks, and lacks only, is its recognition of man as an animal.

What shall we do? How shall we proceed? Shall we make a man to fit the world, or a world to fit the man? It is an open question, probably unanswerable.

One more unanswerable question arises from my amity-enmity equation, and involves unpredictables beyond contemporary imagination. It too rests on beginnings, an appropriate subject for meditation beneath the Janiculum's pines. But these are beginnings peculiar to man, without animal precedent since the time of life's origin in the primal slimes. They are beginnings beginning now.

When I conceived of the amity-enmity equation, I did it in the mood of a private joke on those psychologists who must reduce all human qualities to mathematical statements. I recognized and enjoyed its weaknesses, its failure to include minor symptoms of original or residual amity which exist though insufficiently to effect social organization; its failure to recognize the infinite ranges of human variability; its failure, in other words, to accept the iri-calculability of complex man. As I emphasized in the last chapter, I introduced it not for purposes of predictability but of illumination. And in its conception my engrossment with the relation between amity and enmity was such that [319] I quite failed to consider the harshness of that illumination which the introduction of hazard brought to the equation.

The simplest of arithmetic will demonstrate that as h rises, then to produce an effective amity, E may fall. But let us forgo the dismal swamp of even the simplest arithmetic and recall those experiences of fire and flood and sudden storm, of natural emergencies which as if by spontaneous combustion produce instant mutual aid, unthinking sacrifice, smiles on the faces of strangers, intimacies exchanged which have never changed hands before, a gladness and trust that leave us sorry when the emergency has passed. And this reduction in animosities through increase of natural hazard is no quality uniquely human. Let us take one last excursion into the animal world.

Penguins are among the most ancient of birds. Fossils from the Eocene as old as the oldest lemurs show them little different in anatomy or distribution from the way they are today. All species, in their chilly devotions, lead lives of a certain hazard. But if you compare species with species, you will discover that as hazard goes up, mechanisms for enmity come down.

All penguins have traditional breeding grounds. Carbon dating applied to the frozen mummies of Adelie penguins at McMurdo Sound -- where Wood captured his Antarctic skuas for temporary exile to the South Pole -- indicates that the breeding ground there has been in operation for at least 600 years. But while we may regard the raising of children in that part of the world as an occupation of such inconceivable hazard as to be uniform in its dimension, it is not so. The Adelie builds a normal nest of stones on rocky ground, must fight off the raiding skua, suffers it is true the misfortune of being buried in snowstorms now and again, but still has sufficient unspent energy to seek the stimulation of territorial defense, quarreling with neighbors, and raiding nearby nests for stones. So it goes with the gentoo species in milder Grahamsland, where the male defending his four-foot territory will fight anybody including his mate, unless she makes the proper bow at the border. So it is with the chin-strap, also in Grahamsland, who like the albatross returns season after season to the same site and will evict all comers who seek to dispute him. [320] So it is with the jackass penguin of South African islands, who has gained his name from the braying qualities of his imperishably quarrelsome noyau. But let us look at the emperor.

No natural hazard which this planet offers can rival those circumstances assaulting the life expectancy of the emperor penguin's young. The emperor breeds only on the ice of the Antarctic continent. And he breeds in winter. When March comes, and the southern autumn darkens, the emperor and his wife and his friends conduct their grave march inland across the ice to that place where tradition dictates that they must breed. Theire will be no nest of stones. She will lay her single egg on ice of fathomless depth, and he will pick the egg up ion his foot. Then she will go away, back to the sea and their only source of food. He will remain with the egg on his foot. The perpetual night will enclose him. The Antarctic winter will [321] blow, shudder, sigh, snap, crush, torment the present as it has tormented all ages. He will stand with the egg on his foot. He will stand very close among his friends as shoulder to shoulder they preserve their heat. There will be no argument, disputes over property, dominance, borders, prerogatives. On rare occasion the night will clear to reveal the Southern Cross in cruel arrangement. The southern aurora will in ironic delicacy display its gentle, faraway veils, shifting, impalpable, tantalizing, rewardless. More often the storm will close down. All will vanish. There will be the wind and the cold beyond calculation. There will be the horror of nature's racket, and the horror of nature's silence. There will be the terror of nature's incredible blackness. There will be the terror of nature's soft illumination. And all the time the emperor penguin and his friends will be standing in a dense, unarguing mass, each with an egg on his foot, while slowly they revolve, presenting to this one the periphery of Antarctic hostility, presenting to that one a respite, a moment of comfort and warmth in the heartland of the social body.

For two months, this will be their dispensation. Then their wives, fat and hearty, will return from the sea. The males will surrender their eggs, themselves seek the succor of wide-open waters, the freedom, the succulence of life. When they return, the chicks will have hatched. Springtime will be on its way, and the sunshine, and that most favorable season for the survival of young. This, after all, was the whole evolutionary point, the reason for the time of winter trial.

Brooks too broad for leaping divide us from animal agony. Walls too tall for weeping contain our sympathies. We cannot, with prescience human or divine, apprehend the living moment in a mass of male emperor penguins revolving each with an egg on his foot in a dark, frozen, endless Antarctic night beneath frigid, withdrawn, uncaring stars. You do not know, nor will you ever. I shall not know, nor shall I ever. We may simply record that when h reaches infinity, E reaches zero.

And that is how it may be when natural hazard unmade or unsupported by man approaches the zenith of its value; but what happens to us when it approaches its nadir? What happens when it is h that approaches zero? What must happen to El

The story of civilization has been the reduction of hazard [322] both natural and supernatural in its total effect on human existence. And the story of that facet of civilization called war has been one of consolidation and intensification of enmity. Is the one the consequence of the other? Or is all coincidence?

I take nothing away, of course, from the accomplishments of antiquity when it comes to massacre, slaughter of innocents, and designs for decimation. Homo habilis boasts a fractured skull; violence seems to have been always with us. The cultured Greek, between exercises in philosophy, oratory, and the allied arts, annihilated whole populations whose opinions differed from his own. By then, of course, hazard was sinking, or art would have been impossible. Neither do I wish to detract from experiments with systematic cruelty practiced in oldtime days. Byzantium, a thousand years ago, was ruled by an able emperor named Basil II who suffered ceaseless inconveniences from the unruly Bulgarians. And so, having captured 15,000 of them in battle, he put out their eyes. One man in every hundred, however, was left with one eye, enough to lead his fellows home to their tsar.

We must accept the possibility that throughout history the ameliorating benefits of conscience, which handfuls of thinkers here and there regard as universal, have saved more men than they have killed. The statistics, however, are not convincing. Elastic application of the universal conscience has merely enforced the parochial commands of the amity-enmity complex, so that God fights always on our side. We must accept also the possibility that the growth of enlightenment, the spread of education, and the lengthening attributes of foresight have introduced some measurable inhibitions to the art of murder. But Derek Freeman has presented figures indicating that between 1825 and 1945, a period in which such growth was notable, fifty-nine million people fell victim of "deadly quarrels." The figure, as Freeman grants, is conservative. And even though we acknowledge that population growth has introduced more ducks to the human shooting gallery, still the statistics remain disturbing. In a period in which technological advance was rapidly pressing natural hazard toward a historic minimum, and in which such supernatural hazards as witches and witch-doctors, spells and charms, and hellfire and damnation were rapidly losing ground to [323] unencumbered intelligence, we pressed lethal animosities to their maximum.

The suspicion must exist that the inverse relationship between the fall of hazard and the rise of enmity which the equation would indicate has had at least something to do with it. Perhaps it has merely been that with growing control over our physical environment we have been left with more free time for killing each other. Without doubt our superb technological achievements have presented us with superb opportunities for wholesale murder denied the ancient world. But even making proper allowance for the manifold inducements, temptations, and opportunities more grandly expanding our natural satisfactions derived from mutual massacre, I cannot eliminate from my estimates the necessity for enemies which falling hazard compels.

And so we must face the unanswerable question: What will happen if the control which we exert over our physical environment ever totally eliminates natural hazard? Will man become the temperamental opposite of the emperor penguin? When hazard approaches zero, will enmity approach infinity?

The human predicament contains two forces: On the one hand that balance of terror, the pax atomica, compels a general peace, or at the least insists that a general peace be observed until accident or cynicism end it. In any event, war as we have known it has become both an impractical outlet for our innate psychological needs and an impractical external pressure enforcing our social amity. But on the other hand man's cultural achievements have long since pressed him beyond a point of possible return, and if he is to survive on his irreversible course of technological mastery, specialized skill, and consequent interdependence, then he becomes with every passing year, every passing day, more at the mercy of social amity and mutual co-operation.

And so we must ask: Have our cultural achievements in peacetime, eliminating the reality of natural hazard, matched our cultural achievements in wartime, eliminating the reality of enemies, so that in final sum we must face that primate impossibility, exaggerated by human achievement, reduction to zero of effective amity?

It is the darkest of questions for all those who have placed their faith in cultural evolution as a means for accomplishing the pacification of man. It is a dark enough question for anybody. And unless nature saves us by an [324] unexpected surfeit of earthquakes, volcanic upheavals, tidal waves, and swarms of locusts, we are caught in the most encompassing of traps. I have no suggestion of shaking penetration to offer beyond that most obvious of comments: that we must know ourselves better in the future than we have in the past.

We must know that man, while the alpha fish among species, is unique only in his capacity for getting himself into troubles that for other species nature would be compelled to provide.

We must know that as body and behavior evolve as a collective enterprise, so human behavior like the human body is governed by evolutionary laws comparable to those of any other species.

We must know that while the human brain exceeds by far the potentialities of that possessed by any other animal species, its psychological processes probably differ not at all from those of other higher animals, and from those of lower animals perhaps as well.

While granting that the varying cultural achievements of human populations set man apart from other animals, still we must know that such cultures, however complex, simply serve to fill out behavioral patterns, some as ancient as recorded life.

We must know, and strive with all our might to accept, that while our evolutionary inheritance seems to place a limitation on human freedom, an eternity of natural selection has presented us as its legacy with the foundation of human strength.

We must recall, and recall again, as by choice of subjects I have attempted to emphasize in this final chapter, that man no different from any other animal is a complex of expressions, frequently conflicting, in which no single determinant -- territory, society, dominance, sex, economic necessity, or single innate need for identity, stimulation, or security -- holds exclusive or permanent domain. Man, as does any other animal, lives the life of a whole being.

And finally we must know that the territorial imperative -- just one, it is true, of the evolutionary forces playing upon our lives -- is the biological law on which we have founded our edifices of human morality. Our capacities for sacrifice, for altruism, for sympathy, for trust, for responsibilities to other than self-interest, for honesty, for charity, for friendship and love, for social amity and mutual [325] interdependence have evolved just as surely as the flatness of our feet, the muscularity of our buttocks, and the enlargement of our brains, out of the encounter on ancient African savannahs between the primate potential and the hominid circumstance. Whether morality without territory is possible in man must remain as our final, unanswerable question.

When Eliot Howard in his country clothes sat quietly by an English pond watching his moor hens in their goings and their comings, their unions and their animosities, their patterned wars and their patterned peace, he opened the covers of a book that no man had more than glimpsed before, and he read and comprehended the first chapter. It was all he had time for in the course of one lifetime. The first chapter was enough, however, to give him, as it should give us, a fair inkling as to what the book is about. While he never had time to get past the first chapter, he was undoubtedly curious about the last one. So shall we be curious, and curiosity will grow as we turn further pages. But we, like Howard, will never have time to finish reading the book, and our consolation must be that a last chapter, in all probability, does not exist. [326]

What has been good -- or so I believe -- about an opening inquiry into the role of territory in animal and human affairs is that it gives us in the future some place to stand. The night may be no less dark, the stars no less distant, the human outcome no less uncertain, the voices that advise us in forgotten tongues no less incomprehensible. But we have made a little place in the forest that we may regard as our own. We have sniffed about, recognized a few of its potential resources, found a hiding place or two that seem secure. We have marked out as well as we could the boundaries of our new domain and deposited scent on this tree trunk, that bush, to inform intruders that someone is home. We are predators, of course, and from time to time we shall go out looting and raping and raising general havoc in the surrounding countryside. There will be reprisals, naturally. And that is another reason why it will be so good to have some place to stand, some place to regard as ours.

It is a matter of surpassing remark, when you come down to think about it, what a change in the landscape occurs when you have made a place of your own: how the shape of an oak tree emerges in the darkness to take on that definition which can only be oak; how stars shine brighter, and those of fifth or even sixth magnitude become apparent; how the sound of some running brook -- it must be a long way off -- chants its quiet cadence; how smells rush at you, the smell of mint -- could it be from the brook? impossible -- the smell of leaves, green leaves dampened by dew, but of other leaves also, old leaves, last year's fallen leaves, that sweet, soft odor of death's decomposition. And then there is that muskiness. There is an animal somewhere.