398 THE EVOLUTION OF MEMORY 



may differ, and very possibly does differ, to some extent, but the 

 evidence on which an opinion may be founded is lacking. 



658. To memory, then, is due the advance of the savage beyond 

 the lower animal ; to tradition, the child of memory, the advance 

 of modern man beyond ancient man ; to facts and thoughts stored 

 in books the advance of civilized man beyond the savage. To 

 written symbols also are due his vast potentialities for future 

 advance. In the past of the earth the brute, the mammoth, the 

 bear, the tiger, the horse, the ox, and the sheep, became ever 

 more and more helpless in the presence of a knowledge and an 

 ingenuity, the outcome of organized knowledge, which gathered 

 direfully with the rolling years, and which, though accumulating 

 for ages, were yet comparatively new things in this enormously 

 old world. 



659. The lower animals in proportion as they lack memory 

 in proportion as they are incapable of profiting from experience, 

 but develop more or less exclusively under the stimulus of 

 nutrition move in a narrow, instinctive groove. Their mental 

 traits are 'innate and inherited,' and, therefore, every individual 

 follows nearly exactly in the footsteps of its predecessors. Since 

 they cannot learn they cannot adapt themselves to circumstances. 

 Removed from the ancestral environment, they perish. Cast in a 

 rigid inexpansive mould, they resemble one another of the same 

 species as much mentally as physically. It is different with man. 

 He is pre-eminently the educable, the reflective, the adaptable 

 animal the animal who develops mentally under the stimulus of 

 use. Since men can learn, and since the experiences of no two 

 men are quite similar, they differ in knowledge, ideas, aspirations, 

 modes of thought, and motives for action. Therefore none are 

 very closely alike mentally. The child does not follow exactly in 

 the footsteps of his parent. So great is human educability (i.e. 

 adaptability) that though the mind of the savage differs immensely 

 in all except instincts and powers of learning from that of the 

 civilized man, yet if the child of the latter were trained from birth 

 by the former he could not be other than a savage. Indeed the 

 offspring of civilized parents captured by savages (e.g. American 

 Indians) have actually developed into utter savages. On the 

 other hand, some savages, for example the Maoris of New Zealand, 

 have passed in a single generation from barbarism to civilization. 

 The Maoris, as I judge from personal experience, are not innately 

 inferior mentally to Europeans. They are unable to compete with 

 the intrusive whites only because they are more susceptible to 



