S40 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY, [pt. il 



pennaneut emotional states are generated. Our moral sense 

 has arisen in no such way. But to understand the way 

 in which it has arisen, we must recur to our fundamental 

 problem, and seek for the conditions which first enabled 

 social evolution, as distinguished from organic evolution, to 

 start upon its career. 



It is now time to propose an answer to the question, 

 already twice suggested and partly answered. How did social 

 evolution originate ? Starting from the researches of Sir 

 Henry Maine, which are supported by those of Messrs. 

 Tylor, M'Lennan, and Lubbock, we have come to the conclu- 

 sion that it originated Avhen families, temporarily organized 

 among all the higher gregarious mammals, became in the 

 case of the highest mammal permanently organized. Start- 

 ing from the deductions of Mr. Wallace, we have seen reason 

 for believing that civilization originated when in the highest 

 mammal variations in intelligence became so much more im- 

 portant than variations in pliysical structure that they began 

 to be seized upon by natural selection to the relative exclu- 

 sion of the latter. In the permanent family we have the 

 germ of society. In the response to outer relations by 

 psychical cLanges, which almost completely subordinate 

 physical changes, we have the germ of civilization. Let us 

 now take a step in advance of previous speculation, ^ and 

 see what can be done by combining these two theorems, so 

 that the permanent organization of families and the complex 

 intelligence of the highest mammal will appear in their 

 causal relations to each other. 



Many mammals are gregarious, and gregariousness implies 



* The latest writer upon these su'ijects is inclined to give up the problem 

 as insoluble. " I at least find it diffii3ult to conceive of men, at all like the 

 present men, unless existing in something like families, that is, in groups 

 avowedly connected, at least on the mother's side, and probably always with 

 a vestige of connection, more or less, on the fa'.her's side, and unless these 

 groups were, like many animals, greijarious, under a leader more or less iixed. 

 It is almost beyond imagination how man, as we know man, could by any 

 sort of process have g.iiaed this step iu civiliiJation." — .'c)aj4;ehot, Flij^ia uiid 

 Politics, p. 136. 



