Coming to the highest division, or that portion occupied by mammals or Mammalia, we encounter first primitive mammals (Promammalia), then pouched animals, semi-apes (Lemuroidea), apes, apemen and lastly man, the topmost central portion of the whole tree.

It is important to note in this connexion that physical fitness invariably presupposes mental fitness. We now know that the human brain is profoundly influenced by the activities of the human hands, the left lobe of the brain being developed in right-handed persons, and the right lobe in left-handed persons. We need not be surprised, therefore, to learn that the possession of a prehensile trunk argues a more than an ordinary brain capacity on the part of the elephant. This may be looked at from two standpoints. In the first place such a trunk puts the elephant in far more intimate touch with its environment, thus building up a far better brain structure than it would otherwise possess, while in the second place, if it did not possess a more than ordinary animal intelligence this wonderful sense organ of a trunk would be in large measure useless. Now, Dame Nature does not permit a useless organ to. persist for what to her is any great length of time, so that the persistency of the elephant's trunk is proof positive that it affords its possessor an advantage in the life struggle; and this it could not do were there not an intelligence suitable to its use. This law of Nature is of vital social importance since it gives us the most luminous proof that social evolution is as much a part of Nature's great plan as is biological evolution. The argument is this. The law of natural selection guarantees the survival of the fittest. The struggle for this survival, therefore, insures physical fitness. through physical evolution, and physical fitness is, in the mass, always accompanied by mental fitness. Wherefore, that physical evolution which looks toward physical fitness, is accompanied, step by step, with a mental evolution looking toward mental fitness. This is the process by which a beneficent Nature moves steadily toward a higher dispensation. That this not only is so, but could not be otherwise, a moment's thought will demonstrate.

Until comparatively recent times it has been the fashion to consider the human species as entirely distinct, in the matter of psychology, from all other forms of life. Man was held to be the one being endowed with reason and a soul. Indeed, it is not so very long ago that animals were even held to be incapable of feeling. The movements they made when subjected to pain being accounted for by the convenient theory known as automatism. Such psychic conceptions constituted an insuperable barrier to a scientific understanding of man in the fullness of his nature. To divorce the human race from its immediate progenitors was to leave it psychically stranded on the reefs of dogma, with no possible means of again communicating with the great mainland of biological existence.

We now know, to quote Prof. Haeckel's, "The Riddle of the Universe": "Man's power of conceptual thought and of abstraction has been gradually evolved from the non-conceptual stages of thought and ideation in the nearest related mammals. Man's highest mental powers reason, speech, and conscience - have arisen from the lower stages of the same faculties in our primal ancestors (the simiae and

prosimiae). Man has no single mental faculty which is his exclusive prerogative. His whole psychic life differs from that of the nearest related mammals only in degree, and not in kind; quantitatively, not qualitatively." Thus we are led to see that man's psychic life is no exception to the general rule, that every individual existing to-day is in all ways indissolubly connected with his past in its entirety. Indeed what is commonly called the soul, is in all probability a purely cellular matter dating back for its genesis to some of the earlier forms of life.

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It has been shown that all the Protists exhibit loves and hatreds, attractions and repulsions, and seeming evidences of will and selective choice. These reveal themselves in what are some times called their "tropisms," as the "striving after light and darkness, heat or cold, and in their different relations to positive and negative electricity." In the words of Prof. Haeckel: Attraction and repulsion' seem to be the sources of will, that momentous element of the soul which determines the character of the individual. The passions, which play so important a part in the psychic life of man, are but intensifications of emotion. Romanes has recently shown that these also are common to man and the brute."

According to Prof. Haeckel the soul of man dates back to the unicellular Protozoa with a simple cell-soul. He holds that the "psychic life of multicellular animals and plants is merely the sum total of the psychic functions of the cells which build up their structure."

It is of considerable importance in view of the too prevalent, erroneous tendency to consider man as possessing a monopoly of these psychic functions, that this point be made plain. The whole trend of science, for the last few centuries, has been to show ever more and more clearly, that Nature has no sharp lines of demarcation. Everywhere we find a sort of spectrum, as it were, like unto that in the department of light, where the yellow merges imperceptibly through the orange into the red, without exhibiting any sharply defined point at which one may say; "here ends the yellow and here begins the red." In electrical parlance we speak of conductors and non-conductors, but there are no perfect conductors and no absolute insulators. Pure silver offers a measurable resistance, and dry air conducts to a certain degree. In biology the story is the same. We are informed by Romanes, that it is impossible definitely to mark the point at which certain faculties arise in the development of lower life forms, for the reason that their faculties merge so gradually, the lower into the higher, as to form, as it were, spectrum-like areas rather than sharp lines. Of one thing, however, we may be certain, that just as there is a physical biological tree showing the evolution. of the various life forms, so is there a psychical biological tree exhibiting the upward trend of emotion, intellect and will,- a tree of psychic life, if you please. In his "Mental Evolution in Man" Romanes gives such a tree, the roots of which rest in excitability on the level with protoplasmic organisms. Rising from this common root are two root portions which unite to form the main trunk. One of these is called discrimination and the other conductibility. These are on the level of unicellular organisms. Just above the union of

these two root portions to form the main trunk we find neurility. The right side of the trunk is reserved for branches representing the evolution of the intellect, the left side is devoted to branches representing the evolution of emotions, while the centre, or main trunk, exhibits the development of the will. Just above that portion of the main trunk marked neurility is a rightwardly extending branch marked sensation, and out of this branch comes perception, and out of perception, imagination and out of that, abstraction, and from abstraction, generalisation, and from that, reflection and self-conscious thought, touching at this point the highest human level reached by the tree. Starting again at neurility and keeping to the main trunk we have reflex action and volition. Directly to the left of reflex action a branch is thrust out on the emotional side, marked preservation of species and of self. From this branch come all the emotions, the upwardly extending branch being marked as follows: "Social, partly human, human, savage, civilised."

Since for our purpose it is only necessary to show the general trend of this development, and to make clear the immense importance of our psychical history, it will not be necessary to go more at length into this chart. Romanes asserts that choice is found, in its simplest manifestations, at least as low down as the insectivorous plants, which he says are certainly not agents capable of feeling in any proper sense of that term. He tells us that Amoeba is able to distinguish between nutritious and non-nutritious particles, and to perform an act of adjustment to take advantage of this discrimination. Furthermore some protoplasmic and unicellular organisms are, we are told, able to distinguish between light and darkness, and so to adapt their movements as to seek the one and shun the other. We are informed that the Medusa, representing the first appearance of nerve structure in the upward march of evolution, have special sense organs capable of distinguishing with comparative delicacy and rapidity between light and darkness, and probably also between sound and silence, as well as other useful and specialised organs. As low down as the Mollusca we find animals choosing their mates and remembering a particular locality as their home. Insects and spiders, it is said, possess a power of muscular coördination, and of intelligent adaptation, surpassing that of the lower Vertebrata.

We might enlarge almost indefinitely upon the intimacy of the relation, in every department of his being, between man's present and all of his past, but we believe enough has been written to fasten upon the attention the fact that every structure and every function, every appetite and every faculty, slowly and labouriously through countless thousands of years, differentiated itself out of primitive lifestuff and life-conditions.

It is important again to observe that, pari passu with physical development, there goes on a psychic development, and it is worthy of note that Nature seems to place more value upon psychic development than she does upon physical development. The reason for this view is found in the fact that pleasure is, in the main, constructive and organising, while pain, on the other hand, is usually destructive and disorganising. The explanation of this condition of

affairs is not far to seek and is plainly stated elsewhere herein. Now, experience tells us that certain physical pleasures are disorganising in seeming defiance of the general rule. If we examine the matter closely, however, we shall find that these physically disorganising pleasures are destructive because they entail psychic pain. On the other hand, physical sacrifices may be highly organising because of the psychic pleasure accompanying them. It is not to be expected that these considerations will be noticeably prominent in the lower forms of life, but they will become more and more prominent, and ultimately entirely dominant, as the life drama proceeds toward its climax. He who sacrifices his dinner, thus entailing physical hardship in order that he may feed the starving, is likely to find that the psychic pleasure overrides the animal suffering, and leaves a net gain of constructive happiness. This is only to say that Nature's path is upward from the animal to the spiritual, but is not that enough to say since it shows the millennial glory which awaits the human race and indicates to all who have the eyes to see and the brain to understand, that the time is approaching with the slow certainty of fate when the survival of the fittest will be also the survival of the best? All natural lines converge to that point, the burning spiritual focus which shall light the dawn of the new day.

We cannot refrain, before leaving this portion of our subject, again to call attention to a significant consideration, because of the wide application it will have in a social connexion.

Both Spencer and Romanes have called attention to the fact that there is a necessary and intimate relation between the possession of organs capable of performing certain acts, and an intelligence sufficient to direct those acts in a way to secure an advantage; — in short, that there is a coördination between physical and mental fitness. For example, of all birds, parrots are the most intelligent, being able more than other members of their class to use their feet, beaks and tongues in the examination of objects. The elephant's trunk has an intelligence to match it, while the superior intelligence of monkeys and men may be considered as correlated to that marvelous prehensile instrument, the hand.

We are told that generally throughout the animal kingdom the powers of sight and of hearing bear a direct ratio to the powers of locomotion. Were we to examine, with scientific accuracy, the sense tools of our own friends, we should find them in the main good indices of their intellectual acumen. The child whose hearing is the most acute, whose sight the keenest, whose touch the most delicate, must have a nervous structure making possible such superior functioning, on the one hand, while on the other, this superior functioning will bring to the mind a wealth of experiences which the less endowed would pass idly by, and which will react upon the growing personality to enrich and strengthen it. The point to be remembered for future reference is, that not only does a good sense tool imply an adequate. intelligence to direct it, but it reacts upon that intelligence by bringing to it experiences of a value greater than a poorer tool could command. One of the largest facts in the whole social realm is a veritable twin to this generalisation.

CHAPTER IV