418 Life and Immortatty. 
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 ¢izs 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 
