Science Quote by Arthur Keith

Keith’s list reads like a cold inventory of the human animal: not flawed, not fallen, just stocked with sharp edges. Coming from a scientist steeped in early 20th-century evolutionary thought, the sentence carries the authority of diagnosis. It’s not trying to persuade with metaphor or moral appeal; it’s trying to classify. The blunt pileup of traits functions as a rhetorical lab report: short, declarative, impersonal. By the time you hit “vengeful,” the cadence has already done its work, implying accumulation, inevitability, and a kind of grim completeness.

The intent isn’t merely descriptive. It’s defensive. If these impulses are “by nature,” then social hierarchies, conflict, and cruelty start to look less like political choices and more like biological weather. That’s the subtextual move: converting historically contingent behavior into a stable baseline, and quietly shifting responsibility away from institutions. The list also smuggles in a value judgment while posing as neutral observation. “Competitive” and “ambitious” can be spun as engines of progress; “jealous” and “vengeful” are harder to romanticize. Pairing them suggests the same evolutionary fuel powers both civilization and atrocity, collapsing the moral distinction between building and harming into a single toolkit.

Context matters because Keith’s era was hungry for “scientific” explanations of social order. In the shadow of empire, class stratification, and later world war, biological accounts of human aggression could justify everything from hard-nosed governance to fatalism about peace. The line’s punch comes from its confidence: it doesn’t argue, it asserts. That’s also its risk. By treating these traits as nature, it tempts readers to treat reform as naive and compassion as merely cosmetic, rather than as forces that can rewire what “nature” permits.