PSYCHOLOGY 373 



super-man ? Many, perhaps, do not doubt that this will be 

 so. They point with pride to the tremendous advance which 

 occurred between the hypothetical speechless man of the 

 tertiary epoch and the man of the diluvial period, endowed 

 with speech and using fire and tools ; then from this to the 

 barbarians of the later Stone Age, who cultivated fields and 

 tamed animals ; then on through the dawning culture of the 

 Bronze and Iron Age to the civilised races of ancient and 

 modern times. Is not a vast intellectual advance, they ask, 

 apparent here? Charles Morris (The American Naturalist, 

 1886) thinks the way of civilised man must lead to still greater 

 heights of intellect. Man to-day cannot be the end product 

 of intellectual development ; he is only the beginning of a new 

 developmental process, in which the brain will attain still 

 further supremacy over the body, and the final product will be 

 a being of whose structure we can form no adequate con- 

 ception. 



This is the actual super-man which Nietzsche evolved as the 

 result of the continual progress of development. Branco, how- 

 ever, in the clever chapter which ends his essay on the supposed 

 human teeth found in the Swabian Alps, inquires " is it not 

 logical to regard this super-man not as an end-product but as 

 a stage after which further super-men may follow ? And 

 again, is it absolutely necessary that development must always 

 take place in the same direction ? The history of many 

 organisms shows that development may lead to a bad end, and 

 that instead of leading to victory in the struggle for existence, 

 it may, on the contrary, lead to defeat." Branco cites the 

 machaerodus as an example in palaeontology. In this animal 

 the powerful and saw-like incisor teeth grew to such a size that 

 eventually the animal could not open the jaws sufficiently 

 widely, and so the species died out. Branco therefore thinks 

 it impossible that the progressive enlargement of the human 

 brain for thousands and thousands of years can take place 

 without the body of the super-man becoming progressively 

 feebler, until it dies out owing to its inability to nourish or 

 defend itself, or to propagate its species. 



At what period has human civilisation now arrived ? My 

 own opinion is that we are still on the upward intellectual path, 



