PRE-ANIMISM 57 



become that man himself is more of a machine than had 

 been supposed. He grows by certain laws ; his progress is 

 conditioned by the environment, both physical and social, in 

 which he lives ; his mind is a part of the natural system of 

 things. So with the animal. He fulfils, as far as he can, 

 the same sort of function ; he has his environment, both 

 physical and social ; he works under the same laws of 

 growth which man also obeys ; his mind exhibits substan- 

 tially the same phenomena which the human mind exhibits in 

 its early stages in the child. This means that the animal has 

 as good a right to recognition as a mind-bearing creature, 

 so to speak, as the child ; and this also means that the 

 development of the mind in its early stages and in certain 

 of its directions of progress is revealed most adequately in 

 the animal." 1 Therefore, to study man apart is to mis- 

 conceive him ; it is to refuse to apply the master key to the 

 interpretation of the story of his intellectual and spiritual 

 history. 



Of origins we know nothing ; we can only seek to trace 

 the processes, elusive as these often are, by which things 

 advanced along certain stages. The inter-relation of inorganic 

 and organic is fundamental ; and, in the latter, the steps of 

 the process from moneron to man are so graduated that we 

 cannot put our finger on any one point and say, Here this 

 or that function or faculty began to be. Therefore, dealing 

 with man's psychical development, we cannot say, Here he 

 passed from the non-moral to the moral stage ; or, Here he 

 began to be a religious being. We can only presuppose the 

 emergence of conditions which made him such ; conditions 

 primarily involved in him as a social being. As a solitary 

 animal he is unknown. " It is not good that the man should 

 be alone," 2 and Aristotle is at one with the compiler of the 

 Book of Genesis when he says that " he who is unable to 

 live in society must be either a beast or a god ; he is no 

 part of a state." 3 The same idea is happily expressed in 

 Sir Leslie Stephen's epigram that "a man not dependent 

 upon a race is as meaningless a phrase as an apple that does 

 not grow upon a tree." 4 



Beyond the fact that he was of mammalian descent and a 

 gregarious animal from the start, we know nothing about 

 " primitive " man. No clue to his dim, disordered concep- 



1 Story of the Mind, p. 35. 2 Genesis ii, 18. 



3 Politics, i, 2, 14. 4 Science of Ethics, p. 91. 



