i86 THE ASCENT OF MAN 



Mind can be traced from tribe to nation in an ever 

 increasing complexity and through infinitely deli- 

 cate shades of improvement, till the highest civilized 

 states are reached. In the very nature of things we 

 should have expected such a result. For this is 

 not only a question of faculty. In a far more inti- 

 mate sense than we are apt to imagine, it is a ques- 

 tion of a gradually evolving environment. Every 

 infinitesimal enrichment of the soil for Mind to grow 

 in meant an infinitesimal enrichment of the Mind 

 itself. " It needs but to ask what would happen to 

 ourselves were the whole mass of existing knowledge 

 obliterated, and were children with nothing beyond 

 their nursery-language left to grow up without guid- 

 ance or instruction from adults, to perceive that 

 even now the higher intellectual faculties would be 

 almost inoperative, from lack of the materials and 

 aids accumulated by past civilization. And seeing 

 this, we cannot fail to see that development of 

 the higher intellectual faculties has gone on pari 

 passu with social advance alike as cause and con- 

 sequence ; that the primitive man could not evolve 

 these higher intellectual faculties in the absence of 

 a fit environment ; and that in this, as in other 

 respects, his progress was retarded by the absence 

 of capacities which only progress could bring." ^ 

 * Herbert Spencer, Principles of Sociology ^ Vol. i., pp. 90, 91. 



