MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS. 333 



indeed was the cause of — the psychic emergence. The moment that 

 the primitive man-ape employed extraneous substances intelligently, 

 with a purpose, he ceased to be an ape and became a man. We must 

 believe that the use of tools and the psychic emergence were coinci- 

 dent and interdependent. 



As M. de Pressense says, in his "Study of Origins" (352): "The 

 first tool fashioned by man asserted his royalty over nature. Thus 

 the tool is man's true scepter; whether made of flint or wood or any- 

 thing else — it is the result of thought. This is why the animal, guided 

 by instinct, can effect marvels of construction by the use of its own 

 limbs, but it never makes a tool. A monkey may have chanced one 

 day to lean upon a stick, but he did not cut nor shape the stick nor 

 hand it down to posterity, that they might improve upon it." 



The struggles of the first ape-man to maintain life amid the hostile 

 surroundings in which he found himself are fraught with peculiar in- 

 terest, and are indeed almost pathetic when we consider the great 

 odds that were against him in the fight. His natural weapons of de- 

 fense, the jaws and teeth, were being reduced with a rapidity that 

 must soon have brought about his extinction but for the correlative 

 development of the grasping powers of the hand, which enabled him 

 to employ and supplement his natural organs with the extranatural 

 resources around him. And then it followed, as this grasping power 

 enabled him to use a club or a stone, that some superior indi- 

 vidual made a conscious effort to employ these weapons with more 

 precision and initiate new purposes, and that he thereby learned to 

 think. This was the divine spark that awakened mental life, which 

 acted as a stimulus on the motor nerve centers, and these centers 

 were enlarged by the effort to think. Then, as the brain grew, he 

 could think more, and as he thought more his brain grew, and he be- 

 came a man. If you will pardon the solecism, this primeval man 

 might have said with Descartes ( much to Descartes's surprise, prob- 

 ably, by the application), '' Cogite ; ergo siwi" — I think; therefore 

 I exist. It is an old and true saying that "Man is the wisest of ani- 

 mals because of his hands" — a pre-Darwinian appreciation of corre- 

 lated development that was prophetic. 



We must begin, then, with the first efforts of primitive man to iso- 

 late himself from the animal world by the use of his hands, and the 

 exercise of that manual power which distinguishes him from the rest 

 of the animal kingdom and made him its master. We must consider, 

 however, that primeval man was at first incapable of manufacturing 

 implements and weapons from the materials around him, and was only 

 capable of using in a simple way the gifts of nature as they came 

 from her hands without any modification whatever. Kindly nature 



