54 PHYSICAL BASIS OF CIVILIZATION 



several steps in the process can brutes be taught 

 new tricks or habits. Civilized man teaches children 

 and ignorant adults. But wild brutes have, with a 

 few exceptions, such as when parent birds teach 

 their young how to fly, only nature for a teacher, 

 and these exceptions seem to be owing to naturally 

 selected hereditary predispositions. And how could 

 nature teach a brute to go through the motions of 

 breaking off a branch, trimming branchlets off for a 

 stick, then grasping and uplifting it and striking 

 blows, not at random, but carefully aimed, at a 

 definite object, with premeditated purpose? Then 

 to realize in mind what it had accomplished, and by 

 what means, and to retain the remembrance of it as 

 an inducement to repeat these actions voluntarily 

 in future. Such a complex purpose and line of 

 reasoning is unthinkable in the case of the stolid, 

 primitive, two-footed brute. 



The unimpressionable stolidity of the intellectual 

 faculties of average savages is a well-known fact, 

 and usually this peculiarity differs directly as the 

 time-distance from civilization. How dense, then, 

 must have been the dullness of our brute ancestors ! 



Nature teaches by frequent repetitions of incidents 

 (so-called accidents) which directly induce, step by 

 step, the various consecutive, coherent motions or 

 actions which, when compounded in a certain order 

 with duly adjusted emphasis, constitute a habit or 

 habitual mode of action. It surely is a reckless 

 abuse of the representative faculty to imagine that 



