THE DAWN OF MIND. 129 



The first source — the Mind of a little child — has just 

 been referred to. Mind, in Man, does not start into 

 being fully ripe. It dawns ; it grows ; it mellows ; it 

 decays. This growing moreover is a gradual growing, 

 an infinitely gentle, never abrupt unfolding — the kind 

 of growing which in every other department of Nature 

 we are taught by Nature to associate with an Evolu- 

 tion. If the Mind of the infant had been evolved, and 

 that not from primeval Man, but from some more 

 ancient animal, it could not to more perfection have 

 simulated the appearance of having so come. 



But this is not all. The Mind of a child not only 

 grows, but grows in a certain order. And the aston- 

 ishing fact about that order is that it is the probable 

 order of evolution of mental faculty as a whole. Where 

 Science gets that probable order will be referred to by 

 and by. Meantime, simply note the fact that not 

 only in the manner but in the order of its develop- 

 ment, the human Mind simulates a product of Evolu- 

 tion. The Mind of a child, in short, is to be treated as 

 an unfolding embryo ; and just as the embryo of the 

 body recapitulates the long life-history of all the 

 bodies that led up to it, so this subtler embryo in 

 running its course through the swift years of early 

 infancy runs up the psychic scale through which, as 

 evidence from another field will show, Mind probably 

 evolved. We have seen also that in the case of the 

 body, each step of progress in the embryo has its 

 equivalent either in the bodies or in the embryos of 

 lower forms of life. Now each phase of mental devel- 

 opment in the child is also permanently represented 

 by some species among the lower animals, by idiots, 

 or by the Mind of some existing savage. 

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