88 evolution: the ages and tomorrow 

 And again: 



"In giving to man the moral conformation which he required to 

 be a social animal, nature has probably done all that she was able 

 to do for the human species. But, just as men of genius have been 

 found to extend the bounds of the human intelligence, so there have 

 arisen privileged souls who have felt themselves related to all 

 souls, and who, instead of remaining within the limits of their 

 group and keeping to the solidarity which has been established by 

 nature, have addressed themselves to humanity in general in an 

 elan of love. ... It is that elan itself, communicated in its en- 

 tirety to privileged human beings whose desire it is thereafter to 

 set the imprint of it upon the whole of mankind and— by a contra- 

 diction of which they are aware— to convert a species, which is 

 essentially a created thing, into a creative effort; to make a move- 

 ment out of something which, by definition, is a halt."* 



The evolution of man's real community life begins with 

 the development of village settlements some 6,000 or more 

 years ago. Man began to emerge from the ancestral line of 

 apes more than a million years ago, and the gradual appear- 

 ance of Homo sapiens from the manlike humanoids can be 

 dated about half a million years ago. We have previously 

 stated that in terms of human generations this span of time 

 seems extremely short. It has been only some 30,000 genera- 

 tions since the advent of true man; some 300 generations 

 since the first urban settlements; some 100 generations since 

 the Greek philosophers; and only 14 generations since Gali- 

 leo. Regretfully, we noted that in such limited numbers of 

 generations one can expect little or nothing from the ge- 

 netic factors which controlled man's destiny in the early 

 formative period. Since man's present civilizations will stand 

 or fall on other factors, one is quite willing to welcome the 

 Toynbee idea of change through the activity of creative in- 

 dividuals and mass imitation as one of the factors— imitation 

 being, after all, a way by which the rank and file of animals 

 follow dominant leadership. Eventually, social man may 

 evolve maturity and forget his growing pains. 



* Ibid., p. 212; Bergson, Les Deux Sources . . . , p. 96. 



