CH. xxr.] GENESIS OF MAN, INTELLECTUALLY, 2ij.i 



evolution had proceeded sufficiently far to admit of tLe 

 evolution of life : upon Saturn and Jupiter, as we have seen, 

 the genesis of anything like what we know as life would 

 appear still to be impossible. Again, after the first appear- 

 ance of life upon our earth, a long time must have elapsed 

 before protists, simple plants, and nerveless animals, 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 somewhat long period, 

 during which the still higher psychical changes constituting 

 social evolution were slowly assuming their distinctive 

 characteristics. 



Social evolution, therefore, regarded as a complicated 

 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 per- 

 manent organization, a new era was begun in the progress 

 of things upon the earth's surface. A new set of structural 

 and functional changes began, which for a long while pro- 

 ceeding with the slowness characteristic of the early stages 

 of every order of evolution, are at last proceeding with a 

 rapidity only to be slackened when some penultimate stage 

 of equilibrium is approached. Hence it is in the highest 

 degree unphilosophical to attempt to explain the present 

 position of civilized man solely by reference to the laws of 

 organic and psychical evolution as obtained by the study of 

 life in general. It is for biology to explain the differences 

 \)etween the human hand and foot and the hands and feet 

 v,f the other primates;^ but the chief differences between 

 civilized man and the other members of the order to which 

 ' See Prof. Huxley's admirable monograph on Man's Place in Nature, 



