MATERIALISM AND ITS LESSONS. 675 



his understanding, but to bethink himself that it were just as easy in 

 the beginning, or now, or at any time, for the omnipotent Creator of 

 matter and its properties to make it think as to make mind think. 



Passing from these incidental lessons of humility and reverence, I 

 go on now to show that materialism has its moral lessons, and that 

 these, rightly apprehended, are not at all of a low intellectual and 

 moral order, but, on the contrary, in some respects more elevating 

 than the moral lessons of spiritualism. I shall content myself with 

 two or three of these lessons, not because there are not more of them, 

 but because they will be enough to occupy the space at my disposal. 



It is a pretty well accepted scientific doctrine that our far-distant 

 prehistoric ancestors were a very much lower order of beings than we 

 are, even if they did not inherit directly from the monkey ; that they 

 were very much like, in conformation, habits, intelligence, and moral 

 feeling, the lowest existing savages ; and that we have risen to our 

 present level of being by a slow process of evolution which has been 

 going on gradually through untold generations. Whether or not 

 " through the ages one increasing purpose runs," as the poet has it, it 

 is certainly true that " the thoughts of men are widened with the pro- 

 cess of the suns." Now, when we examine the brain of the lowest 

 savage, whom we need not be too proud to look upon as our ancestor 

 in the flesh say a native Australian or a Bushman we find it to be 

 considerably smaller than an ordinary European brain ; its convolu- 

 tions, which are the highest nerve-centers of mind, are decidedly fewer 

 in number, more simple in character, and more symmetrical in arrange- 

 ment. These are marks of inferiority, for in those things in which it 

 differs from the ordinary European brain it gets nearer in structure to 

 the still much inferior brain of the monkey ; it represents, we may 

 say, a stage of development in the long distance which has been trav- 

 ersed between the two. A comparison of the relative brain-weights 

 will give a rude notion of the differences : the brain- weight of an 

 average European male is forty-nine ounces ; that of a Bushman is, I 

 believe, about thirty-three ounces ; and that of a negro, who comes 

 between them in brain-size, as in intelligence, is forty-four ounces. 

 The small brain-weight of the Bushman is indeed equaled among 

 civilized nations by that of a small-headed or so-called microcephalic 

 idiot. There can be no doubt, then, of a great difference of develop- 

 ment between the highest and the lowest existing human brain. 



There can be no doubt, furthermore, that the gross differences 

 which there are between the size and development of the brain of a 

 low savage and of an average European, go along with as great dif- 

 ferences of intellectual and moral capacities that lower mental func- 

 tion answers to lower cerebral structure. It is a well-known fact that 

 many savages can not count beyond five, and that they have no words 

 in their vocabulary for the higher qualities of human nature, such as 

 virtue, justice, humanity, and their opposites, vice, injustice, and 



