EVOLUTION AND HUMAN DESTINY 



single individual. It represents a totality of society's 

 accumulated experiences, reaching way back, not 

 merely in an additive sense, but constituting in many 

 respects an integration of these experiences. 



It is understandable that the growing societal knowl- 

 edge together with the improving "societal memory" 

 should foster its own self-growth. In its initial phases 

 when spoken language was the only available means of 

 communication and when the spoken word alone 

 served as the vehicle of memory, the rate at which hu- 

 man knowledge accumulated was necessarily a slow 

 process. This must be particularly true, as the develop- 

 ment of language sufficiently expressive for the trans- 

 mission of more than the most simple ideas was itself 

 probably a relatively slow process. It apparently took 

 much longer than the total period of time that has 

 elapsed since the dawn of known history. As writing 

 came into use, the rate of accumulation of human 

 knowledge certainly increased. A further marked in- 

 crease of this rate takes place with the advent of the 

 printing press, becoming ever more rapid, as an in- 

 creasing portion of each generation could be effectively 

 reached by this accumulating information. This last 

 factor is a result of the increasing percentage of lit- 

 eracy among the human race, which has tended to in- 

 crease on the average since the beginning of the art of 

 writing. It is against this background of accumulating 

 knowledge and its wider availability that the fantastic 



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