326 PROBLEMS OF HUMAN EVOLUTION 



to the sum and enabling the next to start from a point a little 

 further advanced. This fact was long ago grasped and ex- 

 pressed in eloquent words by Huxley : " Man alone possesses 

 the marvellous endowment of intelligent and rational speech 

 whereby in the secular period of his existence he has accumu- 

 lated and organised the experience which is almost wholly lost 

 with the cessation of every individual life in other animals : so 

 that he now stands raised upon it as on a mountain top, far 

 above the level of his humble fellows." l Huxley is here com- 

 paring man with the lower animals, but what he has said would 

 be equally true of civilised man in contrast with the savage. 

 Civilised nations during many thousands of years have piled up 

 a mountain of knowledge gained by experience, observation and 

 thought ; from the top of this pile we now survey the world and 

 are apt to flatter ourselves that our superiority to the savages 

 below is due solely to our own greater capacity. The humbler 

 and more correct view has now been made clear to us, and we 

 are able to recognise the magnitude of our debt to former ages, 

 and also the duty of adding something in our turn to the 

 mountain of knowledge. 



There is no disputing the general proposition that intellectual 

 advance among civilised men is due mainly to the accumulation 

 of knowledge and to better methods of presenting facts to the 

 learner for assimilation. Not only do we start a little ahead 

 of the previous generation, but we have at command better 

 machinery for the solution of problems : discoverers have, in 

 fact, framed better formulae for our use, and each of these 

 formulae is a piece of mechanism that enables us to make further 

 progress. With such aids a man, though his brain has reached 

 its full development, may still make headway. Taking advan- 

 tage of machinery forged by the ingenuity of others he may press 

 onward, may range over fresh fields of thought and see the 

 meaning of facts that before seemed meaningless, long after 

 advance in actual intellectual power has become for him, through 

 physiological fact, an impossibility. And when we reflect on 

 this, the question inevitably suggests itself: is intellectual pro- 



1 Man s place in Nature, p. 112. 



