COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



have seen, the genesis of anything like what we 

 know as life would appear still to be impossible. 

 Again, after the first appearance of life upon 

 our earth, a long time must have elapsed be- 

 fore protists, simple plants, and nerveless ani- 

 mals were succeeded by animals sufficiently 

 complex to manifest even the most rudimentary 

 phases of psychical life. And again, as we can 

 now see, the evolution of physical and psychical 

 life to the very high degree exemplified in the 

 primeval ape-like man was followed by a some- 

 what long period, during which the still higher 

 psychical changes constituting social evolution 

 were slowly assuming their distinctive character- 

 istics. 



Social evolution therefore, regarded as a com- 

 plicated series of intellectual and emotional 

 changes determined by the aggregation of men 

 into communities, is a new order of evolution, 

 more highly compounded than any that had 

 gone before it. When, in the course of the 

 struggle for existence, men began to unite in 

 family groups of comparatively permanent or- 

 ganization, a new era was begun in the pro- 

 gress of things upon the earth's surface. A new 

 set of structural and functional changes began, 

 which for a long while proceeding with the slow- 

 ness characteristic of the early stages of every 

 order of evolution, are at last proceeding with 

 a rapidity only to be slackened when some pe- 



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