GENESIS OF MAN, INTELLECTUALLY 



justment achieved during the process of social 

 evolution is far greater than that achieved dur- 

 ing the immediately preceding stages of the 

 process of organic evolution. Between the ape 

 and the primitive man, with his rude levers and 

 hatchets and his few simple previsions, the dif- 

 ference in complexity of correspondence is ob- 

 viously less than between the primitive man 

 and the modern, with his steam-hammers and 

 thermo-electric multipliers, and his long list of 

 sciences and sub-sciences, any one of which it 

 would take much more than a lifetime to mas- 

 ter in detail. 



We have thus passed in review the various 

 aspects of intellectual progress, regarded as a 

 process of adjustment of inner to outer rela- 

 tions, and we have seen that in all the most 

 essential features of this progress there is a wider 

 difference between the civilized man and the 

 lowest savage than between the savage and the 

 ape. It appears that those rare and admira- 

 ble qualities upon which we/elicitate ourselves 

 as marks which absolutely distinguish us from 

 the brute animals have been slowly acquired 

 through long ages of social evolution, and are 

 shared only to a quite insignificant extent by 

 the lowest contemporary races of humanity. 

 As long as we regard things statically, as for- 

 ever fixed, we may well imagine an impassable 

 gulf between ourselves and all other forms of 



85 



