In most explanations of history and the historical process, the primary protagonist, the human being, is painted as a unique creature, who sets himself apart from other animals due to his ability to perform complex thought processes. The ideational wellspring of human thought is credited, and often rightly so, for man's scientific inventions and complex social organisations. The arts, the sciences, and civilisation itself, is testimony to what the human thought process is capable of achieving. But, at the same time, various examples in human history also go on to mock and negate the very thought process that is credited for human development. Such discrepancies in human behaviour are sought to be explained away in terms of the innate selfishness and brutish instinct that man inherits. It is in this context that the duality of human nature needs to be acknowledged. But an acknowledgement of this duality raises the problem of whether we can assign primacy to one facet of human nature.

It has been pertinently observed1 that of the 193 living species of monkeys, all save one, is covered by a coat of hair. Terming this as an exception, the naked ape, or the self-named homo sapien, it is interestingly observed that ‘this unusual and highly successful species spends a great deal of time examining his higher motives and an equal amount of time studiously ignoring his fundamental ones’.