THE EPOCH OF HOPE 79 



animal stops not to think or find out what is the cause, or if 

 it is the same sound or cause that frightened it before, but it 

 cocks up its tail and puts down its head and flies for its very 

 existence. 



But to avoid this, God at this stage of evolution withdrew 

 memory from the mind of man, and in its place gave to 

 thought the impetus of Imagination, which was the first dawn 

 of the Trinity of the Human Soul, so as to evolve civilisation 

 to its present standard, which would have otherwise been im- 

 possible and man would still have been in an uncivilised 

 animal state. But to avoid this, he withdrew memory to pre- 

 vent past fears and past experiences destroying his courage 

 through the memories of past fears and failures discouraging 

 his new-born ambitions, and to fit him for the fresh demands 

 on his energy which higher civilisation would now entail. This 

 would enable mankind to recall in an indistinct manner only 

 the knowledge and experience of his previous ancestors pos- 

 sessed of the same minds and brains which are reborn in 

 himself; and instead of recalling the exact detail of past 

 events, man is now able only to recall the image of the past. 

 In this manner he is able to embellish them by the additions 

 of his now vivid imagination, a process which places his 

 power of thought on the upward road towards reason. For 

 the human mind has in the past been evolved on just the same 

 principles as that of a child, or savage, or of animals up to a 

 certain point of thought. In childhood Imagination and 

 Observation are much more active than in after life, and in 

 the savage this is more marked than in the civilised man. But 

 the power of observation decreases as he regains memory and 

 knowledge as the individual advances in life. So in early 

 man when Imagination first dawned on the world it was far 

 more vivid than it is now, also his quickness of observation 

 and many other qualities he has now lost, such as smell and 

 touch, which are less strongly developed in the civilised man 

 than in the savage. 



For now both men and animals had increased and multi- 

 plied and, the earth having grown cooler, there was not the 

 prodigious vegetation of the earlier stages of its most tropical 

 existence during the carboniferous ages. The struggle for 

 life therefore becomes more bitter from day to day, and will 

 continue to do so from day to day till man has learnt to use 



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