76 fHE COMING OF MAN 



But steady and rapid development of brain and thought is 

 emphasized and made supreme in one line, that of the primates. 

 We need not repeat their history. They were apparently de- 

 feated forms kept in order and confined to their arboreal ref- 

 uge by stronger competitors. The effects of this training, the 

 use of hand and eye in arboreal life, have already been em- 

 phasized; they appear in the systems of manual training in 

 our schools to-day. The millennia of primate training in the 

 school of arboreal life were not wasted. 



The comparatively weak and defenceless anthropoid de- 

 scended from the trees, and pitted his few and feeble wits 

 against brute strength and cosmic force. The result of the 

 struggle was man. His weakness compelled him to be watch- 

 ful and wary, cautious, prying, curious. It compelled him to 

 eke out his feeble muscles by the discovery, manufacture and 

 use of tools. Physically he is tough, enduring, adaptable; a 

 cosmopolitan species ; mentally he is growing keen, observing, 

 thoughtful. There is something human about him, but some- 

 thing more is needed to make him genuine man. 



" Nature," says Osborn, " deals in transitions rather than 

 in sharp lines." We studied the rise of the discovery and 

 recognition of spirit, and hence of religion, in Palseolithic man; 

 of the rapid rise of morals to supremacy in Neolithic days; 

 and of personality in the Bronze epoch. The exact date is of 

 small importance. Those powers became prominent at those 

 times. A more careful and accurate study would place their 

 emergence earlier; their " embryonic development " was vastly 

 more ancient. The fact to be emphasized is that it is just 

 those qualities which have raised him to the mountain top 

 far above his humble fellows," have transfigured him; that 

 he is incurably moral and religious. If he neglects or stifles 

 them, he degenerates into something worse than a beast. To 

 call some men beasts is to slander lower animals. 



Morals arose under the stimulus of social environment and 

 neighborly pressure: religion through the dread and fear of 

 invisible buffeting pov/ers. But in describing the school we 

 must not forget the pupil. There can be no genuine morality 



