4 1 8 Life and Immortality. 



had escaped. Every slight variation in his mental and moral 

 nature, which would consequently be brought about, and 

 which would enable him better to guard against adverse cir- 

 cumstances, and league together for mutual comfort and 

 protection, would be preserved and accumulated. The better 

 and higher specimens of our race would therefore increase and 

 diffuse themselves, while the lower and more brutal would 

 succumb and successively die out, and that rapid advance- 

 ment of mental organization would occur, which has raised 

 the very lowest races of men, whose mentality was scarcely 

 superior to the animal, to that high position which it has 

 attained in the Germanic races. It would be too bold an 

 assertion to say that man's body has become stationary. 

 Slow and gradual changes still take place, although his mere 

 bodily structure long ago became of less importance to him 

 than that subtle energy, which is termed mind. No one can 

 doubt that this gave his naked and unprotected body cloth- 

 ing against the varying inclemencies of the seasons and 

 enabled him to compete with the deer in swiftness and the 

 wild bull in strength by giving him weapons wherewith to 

 capture or subdue them both. Though less capable than 

 most other animals of subsisting on the herbs and the fruits 

 of unaided nature, it was this wonderful faculty that taught 

 him to govern and direct nature to his own benefit, and com- 

 pel her to produce food for him when and where he pleased. 

 From the moment, then, when the first skin was used as a 

 covering, the first rude spear fashioned to aid in the chase, 

 and the first seed sown or shoot planted, a grand revolution 

 was effected in nature, a revolution which had had no parallel 

 in all the previous cycles of the world's history, for a being 

 had arisen who was no longer necessarily subject to a 

 changing universe, a being who was in some degree superior 

 to nature, inasmuch as he knew how to control and regulate 

 her action, and could maintain himself in unison with her, 

 not by a change brought about in the body, but by a growth 

 and advance in mind. Therein are shadowed forth the true 



