562 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. [n. u. 



special experience of the individual counts for something in 

 altering the future career of the race. Such an animal is 

 capable of psychical progress, and such an animal must 

 begin life, not with matured faculties, but as an infant. 

 Instead of a few actually realized capacities, it starts with a 

 host of potential capacities, of whicli the play of circumstance 

 must determine what ones shall be realizable. 



Manifestly, therefore, the very state of things which made 

 psychical variation more advantageous to the progenitors of 

 mankind than physical variation, this very state of things 

 simultaneously conspired to enhance the progressiveness of 

 primeval man and to prolong the period of his infancy, until 

 the plastic or malleable part of his life came to extend over 

 several years, instead of terminating in rigidity in the course 

 of four or five months, as with the orang-outang. Upon the 

 consequences of this state of things, in gradually bringing 

 about that capacity for progress which distinguishes man from 

 all lower animals, I need not farther enlarge. What we 

 have here especially to note, amid the entanglement of all 

 these causes conspiring to educe humanity from animality, is 

 the fact, illustrated above, that this prolongation of infancy 

 was manifestly the circumstance which knit those permanent 

 relationships, giving rise to reciprocal necessities of behaviour, 

 ^ hich distinguish the rudest imaginable family group of men 

 from the highest imaginable association of gregarious non- 

 human primates. 



In this line of inquiry, which, so far as I know, has never 

 yet been noticed by any of the able writers who have dealt 

 with the origin of the human race, it seems to me that we 

 have the clew to the solution of the entire problem. In this 

 new suggestion as to the causes and the effects of the pro 

 longed infancy of man, I believe we have a suggestion as 

 fruitful as the one which we owe to Mr. Wallace. And the 

 most beautiful and striking feature in this treatment of the 

 problem is the way in which all the suggestions hitherto 



