COHESIVE POWER OF SOCIAL LIFE 255 



gence, greater probably than in any of his animal pred- 

 ecessors; (2) an extremely elaborate visual, vocal, and 

 auditory equipment, readily adaptable to communica- 

 tion and cooperative social action; and (3) a pair of 

 appendages (arms and hands) relatively free from lo- 

 comotor demands, and themselves rightly constructed 

 for constructive purposes. How, or why, all these or- 

 ganically distinct sets of structures and functions, so 

 essential to social life, happened to exist in primitive 

 man, and which one of them, if any, preceded or ex- 

 ceeded the other, we do not know; nor is it pertinent 

 to our present discussion. There they undoubtedly 

 were, and they, with practically all their subsidiary 

 parts, were initiated very far back in the arthropod-ver- 

 tebrate stock, millions of years before the mammals, to 

 say nothing of man himself, existed; and long before 

 they could be utilized in social life as they are today. 

 Thus each of these important organic systems, after 

 an immeasurably long constructive period, came to 

 man essentially as they are today, rightly modeled be- 

 forehand, and with all their great social potentialities 

 ready for exploitation, and so they are likely to re- 

 main. What these potentialities are we may better 

 realize, perhaps, if we try to imagine what the result 

 would have been if some one of these conditions had 

 been otherwise. Suppose, for example, that primitive 

 man, though endowed with the intelligence of a Greek 

 or Hindoo philosopher, had inherited a hand like a 

 horse's foot, or an eye like an ant's, or vocal and audi- 

 tory organs like those of a grasshopper. Intelligence 

 of that order, even if it could under those conditions 

 have come into being, with such instruments to work 

 with would have little or no constructive social value. 



