Mind begins as a vague
consciousness of touch or pressure on the part of some primitive,
shapeless, soft creature: it ends as an organised and co-ordinated
reflection of the entire physical and psychical universe on the part of
a great cosmical philosopher.
Last of all, like diners-out at dessert, the evolutionists take to
politics. Having shown us entirely to their own satisfaction the growth
of suns, and systems, and worlds, and continents, and oceans, and
plants, and animals, and minds, they proceed to show us the exactly
analogous and parallel growth of communities, and nations, and
languages, and religions, and customs, and arts, and institutions, and
literatures. Man, the evolving savage, as Tylor, Lubbock, and others
have proved for us, slowly putting off his brute aspect derived from his
early ape-like ancestors, learned by infinitesimal degrees the use of
fire, the mode of manufacturing stone hatchets and flint arrowheads, the
earliest beginnings of the art of pottery. With drill or flint he became
the Prometheus to his own small heap of sticks and dry leaves among the
tertiary forests. By his nightly camp-fire he beat out gradually his
excited gesture-language and his oral speech. He tamed the dog, the
horse, the cow, the camel. He taught himself to hew small clearings in
the woodland, and to plant the banana, the yam, the bread-fruit, and the
coco-nut. He picked and improved the seeds of his wild cereals till he
made himself from grass-like grains his barley, his oats, his wheat, his
Indian corn.
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