294 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. \vt. t 



he belongs are psycliological differences, and tlie immense 

 series of psychical changes to which they are due has been 

 all along determined by social conditions. 



The all-important contrast, therefore — for our present pur- 

 pose — is not hctiucen man and other primates, extinct and 

 conteinporary, hut between civilized man and primitive man. 

 Already we have found t?iat the lowest contemporary man, 

 whose social organization has never reached any higher form 

 than that of the simplest tribal community, exhibits but 

 scanty traces of the godlike intellect, the refined tastes, or the 

 lofty soul which we are accustomed to ascribe to humanity 

 in general as its distinctive attributes. Humanity, zoolo- 

 gically considered, exists to-day, to which these attributes 

 cannot be ascribed without a considerable strain upon the 

 accepted meanings of our words.. Zoologically, the Australian 

 belongs to the genus Homo, and is therefore nearer to us than 

 to the gorilla or gibbon ; psychologically, he is in many 

 respects further removed from us than from these man-like 

 apes. No one will deny that the intellectual progress implied 

 in counting- up to five or six, though equally important, is 

 immeasurably inferior in quantity to the subsequent progress 

 implied in the solution of dynamical problems by means of 

 the integral calculus, — an achievement to which the average 

 modern engineer is competent. But in going back to the 

 primeval man, we must descend to a lower grade of intelli- 

 gence tLan that which is occupied by the Australian. We 

 must traverse the immensely long period during which the 

 average human skull was enlarging from a capacity of thirty- 

 five inches, like that of the highest apes, to a capacity of 

 seventy inches, like those post-glacial European skulls, of 

 which the one found at Neanderthal is a specimen, and which 

 are about on a par with the skulls of Australians. And 

 when we have reached the beginning of this period — possibly 

 in the jNIiocene epoch — we may fairly represent to ourselves 

 the individuals of the human genus as animals differing in 



