778 Causes and Course of Organic Evolution 



been an earnest endeavor to evolve and perfect a non-competi- 

 tive and cooperative organization of increasingly wide extent. 

 The experiments leading up to this have been prolonged through 

 many thousands of years — 20,000 to 50,000 seem by no means 

 too extended — but the more exact trend taken will only be 

 traced here during the recent historic period of 8000-10,000 

 years. 



So when rapid and varied environal impressions and pro- 

 environal responses in primitive man became perfected, and 

 were united hereditarily with those social tendencies that he 

 inherited from the antlu-opoid apes, man became alike struc- 

 turally and hereditarily, the organism that would carry coop- 

 erative effort to its highest and most satisfying plane of action. 

 The marvelous advance that man has made during the past 

 century is wholly due to the evolution amongst the civilized 

 nations of cooperative effort in ever widening degree, combined 

 with the correlative evolution in him, as in every cooperative 

 group of animals, of an advancing moral perception, that has 

 registered equally the failures and shortcomings of cooperative 

 activity, as well as the immense success that accrued there- 

 from. 



In thus reaching to the cooperative and moral platform, 

 that may be said to have had its feeble inception twenty to 

 fifty thousand years ago, man had advanced to the third of 

 four great platforms of advance. The first of these was occu- 

 pied when primitive and nude man allowed the carnal or biotic 

 and the sensory or cognitic largely to dominate all higher 

 qualities, and so caused him to live a semi-solitary life that 

 might be termed the brutal. Lingering though somewhat 

 advanced examples of this were men like the Tasmanians, 

 the Bushmen, the Hottentots, and the more primitive Aus- 

 tralians where untouched by higher outward influence. 



The second platform was reached when man began mentally 

 to compare, to correlate, and to appraise at their summated 

 value all of the carnal or biotic, and the sensory or cognitic 

 acts of his and his family's every-day acts. This caused him 

 to develop a quickened cogitic relation to all forces around 



