1. Ed. Le Roy, Les Origines humaines et l'évolution de l'intelligence (Paris: Boivin & Cie, 1931), p. 13.

2. E. Durkheim, Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (2d ed.; Paris: F. Alcan, 1925), p. 92.

3. Ed. Claparède, "De l'intelligence animale à l'intelligence humaine," Le Mystère animal (Paris: Plon, 1939), p. 175.

4. Preface of Mystère animal, a study that appeared in the collection, "Presences," under the direction ofDaniel-Rops (Paris: Plon, 1939).

5. Le Roy, op. cit., p. 209 : "At the very least, during the transition from beast to man is not the existence of a threshold doubtful—a decisive threshold, that up to the present remains inaccessible, imperceptible?"

6. We have taken these observations on fish from an article by Léon Binet of the Académie des Sciences.

7. In La Révolution originelle, shortly to be published by Vrin.

8. "Indeed, so far as it was able to break the chains that bound it to a concrete foundation, the spirit took flight…. This is the great revolution that occurred in man and that has pro gressed so prodigiously, endowing him with fresh powers, the mind's field of action. And in the end the individual had to free himself from this universe, from this surrounding world of which he is an integral part…. And by thus detaching himself, by dissociating himself from the world and removing himself a sufficient distance from it, he rendered himself competent tojudge it instead of merely submitting to it" (Claparède, loc. cit., pp. 177-78).

9. The "cephalic coefficient," established by Eugène Dubois (discoverer of the Pithe canthropus), makes it possible to assess the relative importance ofthe brain in the animal series by eliminating the differences due to the size of the species.

10. Cf. Claparède, loc. cit., p. 165.

11. Primitive man was still quite close to the monkey in terms of the capacity of his brain. On the subject of the Neanderthal man, who already fashioned tools, possessed the rudiments of language, and belonged to the human species from a psychological point of view, see C. Arambourg, La Genèse de l'humanité (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948), who makes the following statement: "Moreover, the mouldings of the endocranian cavity reveal, in the general morphology of the Neanderthal man's encephalin, a mixture of human and simian structures, the latter being more numerous. Thus, the general simplicity and the crude aspects of the circumvolutions … are so many indications of intellectual inferiority" (p. 43). Quite as interesting in this regard, we believe, is the case of the Australopithecus which was ranked among the Hominidae for a while, and about which Marcellin Boule, Les Hommes fossiles (3d ed.; Paris: Masson & Co., 1946), made the following remark: "It is still only a large monkey according to its weak cerebral capacity, but in the morphology of its cranium, and above all in its dentition, it seems to have more human than simian tendencies" (p. 87). (Italics mine.)

12. If the okapi should become entirely extinct, how many bones would we find a hundred thousand years from now? And even today the animal is almost not to be seen.

13. Guyénot. R. Broom also notes the rapid disappearance of direct ancestors: "The first amphibian quadruped sprang from fish with lobated fins that belong to the Devonian period, and it seems that the ancestor disappeared at once…. Later, during the Carboniferous pe riod, an amphibian of a higher order gave birth to the first reptile; and after the Carboniferous period no amphibian remained that could have had a reptile as a descendant.' In this con nection we should cite the remark made by Père Teilhard du Chardin: "Man … does not lend his exact form to anything that we know about prior to him" (quoted from Le Roy, loc. cit., p. 176).

14. Boule, op. cit., p. 550. The same author observes a little further on that "we know nothing or almost nothing about the men ofthat epoch; the sole remains that have come down to us are those of the Heidelberg man" (ibid., p. 552).

15. Arambourg, op. cit., pp. 119-20, observes on this topic: "Actually, of all the large animals, he is physically the weakest and the most devoid of means of defense. His contem poraries, the large anthropoids, preserved a sturdy weapon in their powerful musculature which enables them to defend themselves effectively against wild beasts. With the aid of his physical resources alone, man would have been quite incapable of this; he would not even have been able to compete with his primitive cousins in the forest to which he thus confined his nakedness and weakness."

16. Cf. Boule, op. cit., p. 537: "The fossil monkeys of Siwalik and South Africa decreased to a certain point the morphological interval separating today's monkeys from today's men…. It is altogether possible that, among the numerous tertiary types of anthropomorphous mon keys, about which we have only fragmentary information, there might be … which, to gether with prehuman dentitions, exhibited cranian measurements superior to those of present-day Anthropomorphia" (ibid., p. 128). "Many of these creatures might have transcended the stage in which the present-day anthropoids seem fixed…. This interpretation leads us to rec ognize that there once had been Anthropomorphia superior to those of today" (ibid., pp. 108-9).

17. E.g., the Australopithecus have disappeared; their limbs "were not adapted to the exclusively arboricolous life of the large monkeys" (Boule, ibid., p. 90). Man's animal ancestor was so inferior that Le Roy suggests—rather gratuitously, we believe—that it could have sur vived only i fit were quadrumanous and therefore able to seek refuge in trees. Le Roy remarks: "Man had neither the strength, size nor speed; no hooks, horns, claws, armor or venom: homo nudus et inermis…. Too weak to stand and fight, too large to hide, too slow to flee; if origi nally he had lived on the ground, he would either have disappeared or become industrious at an earlier date" (op cit., p. 188). But the evolution of the limbs of Primates began with the foot and culminated with the hand; it seems impossible that this tendency was reversed if only because of the mortal dangers that this hypothetical Primate would have encountered by re nouncing the shelter of high branches.

18. Cf. Arambourg, op. cit., p. 71: "The limbs [of the Neanderthaloids] are of entirely human proportions, but the buttocks are relatively short."

19. Ibid., p. 53: "The limbs [of the Cro-Magnon] are long and sturdy, the lower ones being extremely long compared to the upper." Cf. also Boule, op. cit., p. 301, where the author observes, in regard to the men of the Grimaldi race, that "their lower limbs were very much longer than their upper." As for the Chancelade race, which is considered similar to the Cro-Magnon, Boule notes (ibid., p. 322) the development "of all the rear muscles of the leg, those used the most in the erect position as well as when walking."

20. Boule, op. cit., p. 478.

21. Arambourg, op. cit., p. 134.

22. As we have seen (n. 16 above), the Anthropomorphia from which man came were more specialized in the cerebral sense and consequently better adapted physically than are today's monkeys; those Anthropomorphia that did not undergo the hominoid transformation did not survive.

23. The "will to power" which, according to the psychologist Jung, is the key to the hu man subconscious (at least as much, if not more than Eros, according to the author), attests the individual's carnivorous tendency to enslave others.

24. La Révolution originelle.

25. "We cannot see why a deeply rooted human instinct would need to be reinforced by a law. There is no law commanding man to eat and drink, or forbidding him to put his hand in a fire" (Frazer, cited by R. Dalbiez, La Méthode psychonalytique et la doctrine freudienne [Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1949], I, 458).

26. We might add that the development of intellectual life went hand in glove with the growth of social life, by virtue of this same phenomenon of symbiosis.

27. Cf. Ch. Blondel ("La Personnalité," Nouveau traité de psychologie, ed. G. Dumas, VII, Book I, 124): "Whatever form it takes, excommunication remains for him [man] the most dreaded of all penalties." In this connection, we are familiar with Victor Hugo's stanza:

In the child, still so close to nature, fear of solitude is characteristic. P. Guillaume, Manuel de psychologie (Paris: Alcan, 1931), observes: "Everyone is familiar with the precocious atti tudes of the child in regard to other people. He is disturbed by solitude (cries) and demands company and fondling" (p. 52). And Freud, in his Introduction to Psychoanalysis, says: "The first situation phobias of children are darkness and solitude" (pp. 352 ff.). Some writers (Adler, Künkel) have even attributed in a general way the origin of a neurosis to a feeling of social exclusion. Cf. W. Bitter, "Die Angstneurose," Revue Suisse de psychologie et de psychologie appliquée, No. 16 (Berne: Huber, 1948): "Basing his ideas on Adler, Fritz Künkel sees the principal cause of neurological fear in the discovery that one is outside the collectivity." The explorer, R. Maufrais, identified his overwhelming fear of a virginal forest with fear of soli tude. Under the dateline of November 20, 1949, he observed: "I feel that this apprehension is the fear of solitude to which I am constrained."

28. G. Ferrero, Les deux Revolutions françaises (Neuchâtel: Éditions de la Baconnière, 1951), P. 35.

29. Maxime Gorki, Un Évènement extraordinaire (Paris: Éditions Rieder, 1933), P. 45.

30. Ferrero, op. cit., p. 36.

31. As distinguished from purely political revolutions, which bring a new party to power or modify the form of government but fail to affect the basic social order, the French Revolu tion, which was primarily social, destroyed the social foundations; hence the vague state of panic which it engendered. The relative brevity of the Terror in France can be explained by the swift consolidation of the new social order. This new order leaned heavily upon social strata that had become fully developed as early as the end of the eighteenth century and were therefore able to take the place of the ancient regime. Things would have gone differently, as in other countries, ifit had been necessary to begin by creating the social elements required by the new regime. In such an eventuality, the Terror (along with the political anxieties which reflected it) would doubtless have persisted for a whole generation.

32. Bitter (op. cit., p. 55) cites the case of an Italian with agoraphobia who fell prey to his panic just as he happened to be looking at a Fascist exposition; he began to imagine that he had rendered important services to the cause and that the Duce was patting him on the back in a friendly way; his anxiety immediately disappeared, and he was able to continue on his way. Alfred Adler (cited by Bitter, op. cit., p. 59) observes that "human anxiety can be eliminated solely by an awareness of the tie that binds the individual to the collectivity. A man will live his life fearlessly only if he is aware of belonging to the community ofother men." Similarly, a child frightened by the dark is reassured when he hears a human voice (cf. Freud, op. cit.: "I once heard a child, who was afraid of the dark, call into an adjoining room, ‘Auntie, talk to me, I am afraid.'

33. We are familiar with the old saying that idleness "is the mother of all vices."

34. Madame Roland.

35. Cf. H. Piéron, "Psychologie zoölogique," Nouveau traité de psychologie, ed. G. Dumas, VIII, 206: "In their society insects devote almost all their activity to the maintenance and per petuation of the collectimty."

36. Among all primitive peoples the period of puberty is also the time when the individual is formally brought into the social group; until then he belonged exclusively to his family. From the moment he reaches puberty his position changes to that of a member of the social group; the initiation ceremony merely expresses a profound biological reality, for the procrea tive instinct is basic to social life.

37. Urbain and Rode (Les Singes anthropomorphes [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France 1946], p. 86) observe apropos of gorillas that "the old males live in solitude"; on the subject of chimpanzees they remark (ibid., p. 78) that "the old males usually remain aloof." Also see F. Picard, Les Phénomènes sociaux chez les animaux (Paris: Colin, 1933): "Among many large Mammalia, sociability is apparent in the females but in the males it depends upon age and physiological condition. The males are part of the herd when they are young; but later they withdraw, become mean, chase their kin, and resume their social instincts only when they are in heat" (p. 4).

38. Marriage is one aspect of control. The genesic instinct, which developed during man's presocial stage, is suited to a solitary existence, not to collective life; for this reason, collective life can easily create serious or complex complications in the individual's sexual life. Freudianism has stressed this fact.

39. J. Delay, La Psycho-physiologie humaine (Paris: P.U.F., 1948), p. 52, observes that the sexual instinct, "like other instincts, is made up of a biological infrastructure and a social super structure responding to an infinitely complex process in the socialization and spiritualization of tendencies."

40. The direct relationship between man's social nature and the genesic instinct is particu larly evident in this remark of Freud's (cited by Dalbiez, op. cit., I, 163): "In my experi ence, whoever is considered abnormal in any domain from a moral or social point of view is always abnormal in his sexual life." Freud did not observe the opposite phenomenon. But the externally normal sociability of certain sexually abnormal people does not prove a thing be cause the essence of social life is affirmed in man's profound effort, in the secrets of the soul where the future is forged, not in superficial agitation, which alone is perceptible from the outside.

41. We know that according to the Bible, when the Lord concluded the New Alliance with Abraham, he promised him numerous descendants.

42. In religions that were crude, that had remained quite material, the direct, sexual sym bols consequently occupied a considerable place. The tie between the genesic instinct and re ligious sentiment subsists, in a purified form, even in the most spiritualized religions. Cf., for example, C. G. Jung, Psychologie de l'inconscient (Geneva: Librairie Georg, 1952), pp. 201-2: "… The Church is a mother in the most complete sense of the word and from every point of view. We not only speak of the Church, ‘our mother,' but also of its bosom. In the cere mony of the ‘benedictio fontis,' the baptismal founts are spoken of as "immaculatus divini fontis uterus.' … Indeed, the Church represents the substitution ofa higher and more spiritual order for the so-called ‘carnal' ties that attach us to our parents."

43. Cf. E. Durkheim (Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, p. 148, note 2): "More over, one cannot understand the primitive family organization unless one knows primitive, religious ideas; for the latter serve as the principle of the former."

44. The history of ancient Greece exemplifies in curious fashion the kind of dissensions that may cause modem Europe to founder. Just as the conflict between Sparta, a warlike state, and Athens, a cultured republic, was once the cause of the Peloponnesian Wars, so the spiritual incompatibility between a heavily militarized Germany and France, more Athenian than Spartan, constituted the crux of the two world wars of our era. In both cases, the two successive conflicts culminated in the hegemony of an outsider; in the first instance, of Thebes, oddly located in relation to the Athens-Sparta Axis and west of the latter, and in the second, of the Anglo-Saxon world. We won't push the analogy any further.

45. The Latin term religere, from which religio is derived, means precisely "to bind," in the particular sense of uniting men, whom no natural, social force binds.

46. People have reproached Freud all too requently for the role he attributed to Eros in the human subconscious. Curiously enough these critics overlook an essential fact: Eros rules man only because it is 1) the basis of social life, and 2) the expression of the fundamental will to survive that animates all beings. In the struggle for life over death, which is the essential drama of Creation, the genesic instinct appears as the breach in the wall of universal death: thanks to it, life escapes the trap of nothingness. Is it astonishing that this force should seem sovereign to the soul? The partisans as well as the enemies of the Freudian concept make the same mistake: they forget the meaning because of the symbol. The sovereign power of love, stronger than death, is expressed by symbols that shock some superficial minds. But, besides the fact that the ugliness of certain symbols is merely the interpretation which man, in his psychic poverty, places upon them—for in themselves they are neither ugly nor beautiful—the moral forces express themselves inevitably by material symbols and these must be adequate, that is to say, in harmony with what they represent. From this point of view, the portrayal of the psychic power of love by the symbols of Eros is adequate.

47. We know the ideas that Leo Tolstoi professed about art during the second half of his life; what we don't know is that the word which denotes artist in the Russian language (khoudojnik) stems from the word "bad" (khoudoi).