At length there came a wonderful
moment--silent and unnoticed, as are the beginnings of all great
revolutions. Silent and unnoticed, even as the day of the Lord which
cometh like a thief in the night, there arrived that wonderful moment at
which psychical changes began to be of more use than physical changes to
the brute ancestor of Man. Through further ages of ceaseless struggle
the profitable variations in this creature occurred oftener and oftener
in the brain, and less often in other parts of the organism, until by
and by the size of his brain had been doubled and its complexity of
structure increased a thousand-fold, while in other respects his
appearance was not so very different from that of his brother apes.[3]
Along with this growth of the brain, the complete assumption of the
upright posture, enabling the hands to be devoted entirely to prehension
and thus relieving the jaws of that part of their work, has cooeperated
in producing that peculiar contour of head and face which is the chief
distinguishing mark of physical Man. These slight anatomical changes
derive their importance entirely from the prodigious intellectual
changes in connection with which they have been produced; and these
intellectual changes have been accumulated until the distance,
psychically speaking, between civilized man and the ape is so great as
to dwarf in comparison all that had been achieved in the process of
evolution down to the time of our half-human ancestor's first
appearance. No fact in nature is fraught with deeper meaning than this
two-sided fact of the extreme physical similarity and enormous psychical
divergence between Man and the group of animals to which he traces his
pedigree. It shows that when Humanity began to be evolved an entirely
new chapter in the history of the universe was opened. Henceforth the
life of the nascent soul came to be first in importance, and the bodily
life became subordinated to it. Henceforth it appeared that, in this
direction at least, the process of zooelogical change had come to an end,
and a process of psychological change was to take its place. Henceforth
along this supreme line of generation there was to be no further
evolution of new species through physical variation, but through the
accumulation of psychical variations one particular species was to be
indefinitely perfected and raised to a totally different plane from that
on which all life had hitherto existed. Henceforth, in short, the