554 NATURE CROWNED IN MAN 



(perhaps they would speak more if they had more to say) ; 

 and that there are animal societies at various levels of dif- 

 ferentiation and integration. Rousseau's saying, " Man did 

 not make society, Society made man ", may be taken to 

 cover the fact of pre-human anthropoid sociality. As Mr. 

 Hobhouse says, " We find the basis for a social organisation 

 of life already laid in the animal nature of man." But 

 allowing all this and more, we are constrained to admit 

 that Man stands to a remarkable degree apart, and that pre- 

 human evolutionary formula no longer quite fit. 



The theromorphists, who see in Man only a bipedal mam- 

 mal, are wont to point to children, with their delicious 

 primitiveness of gait and speech, of manners and morals, 

 and with their largely pre-intellectual thought-stream in 

 which the world is " one great booming buzzing confusion " ; 

 but while such facts strengthen our conviction of Man's 

 affiliation with mammals, they do not affect our impression 

 of his apartness when a fully developed personality. 



We probably err, as Sir Arthur Mitchell never tired of 

 insisting, in dwelling too much on degraded savages, for 

 when we wish to get the truest appreciation of any type we 

 should study its fullest expression, and some at least of 

 the degraded savages are probably in process of retrogres- 

 sion, being the descendants of the under-par remnants of 

 tribes sifted or persecuted too severely. Furthermore, many 

 unsophisticated people take a good deal of knowing and are 

 not quick to lay bare their souls either to missionary or 

 scientific ethnologist. 



But our point is the simple one that Man at his best 

 who reasons and thinks about his thinking, who bends Nature 

 to his will, who seeks after the True, the Beautiful, and the 

 Good with all his heart and soul and strength is a being 



