Riverside Educational Monographs

EDITED BY HENRY SUZZALLO

PRESIDENT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTONSEATTLE, WASHINGTON

THE MEANING OF INFANCY

BY

JOHN FISKE

1883

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

I. THE MEANING OF INFANCY From "Excursions of an Evolutionist"

II. THE PART PLAYED BY INFANCY IN THE EVOLUTION OF MAN From "A Century of Science"

OUTLINE

INTRODUCTION

The new significance of education

The last century has witnessed an unprecedented development in thesignificance of education. One direct consequence has been anincreased reverence for childhood. In this movement which hasincreased the dignity of children and schools, two large forceshave been at work, --one social and the other scientific. Thegrowth of the democratic spirit among men and institutions has madethe education of children a public necessity, and lifted the schoolto a position of high social importance. The application of thetheory of evolution to man and his life has revealed human infancyas one of the largest factors making for the superiority of man inthe struggle for existence, and given to childhood a vastbiological importance. The necessities of democracy and the truthsof science, acting more or less independently of each other, havegiven to education a breadth of meaning which it did not possessbefore. They have shown that infancy is the largest opportunityand education the most powerful instrument for the consciousadjustment of man to the physical and social world in which helives. 

_Democracy changes the function of schools_

It was the attempt of democracy to educate all of its childrenwhich was the initial and important event that provoked largechanges in our notions of the social function of education. Aslong as the school was for the few, and such it was in the lessliberal periods of history, the school tended to be anauthoritative institution with more or less rigid methods ofprocedure. With fixed ideas of truth and the means of acquiringtruth, it was to a considerable degree unbending in its attitudetoward youth. Even if freedom from economic toil and socialregulation permitted, only the type of mind that could fit theschool's established institutional ways could endure its disciplineand achieve its rewards. Other types of mentality it would notreceive or retain as students. Under such an organization theschool was selective of a special kind of talent. It was not aninstrument, so adjustable in its methods of appeal and instruction, that every manner of child could gain considerable of the wisdom ofthe world. But when a more democratic order was established, thefunction of the school underwent a considerable change. Democracygranted to all men freedom in manhood; to safeguard its privileges, it had to educate all men in childhood. The school for selectedscholars had to be transformed into a school for every variety ofcitizen. With every child sent to school by order of the state, the teacher had to forego his traditional aloofness, and to adjusthis methods of teaching so that every member of the enlarged schoolcommunity could come into a knowledge of the civilization in whichhe lived. With the inclusion of the blind, the deaf, the slow ofmind, and the restless of spirit, --individuals left out of the oldscheme of education and now reverently educated by the newdemocratic order in spite of all their defects, --the school becomesmore flexible and variable in its methods of transmitting truth. More of the knowledge of human life is brought within thecomprehension of children; more men are brought into a large andsympathetic participation in the activities of our civilization. In the truest sense the school becomes an instrument of adjustmentbetween childhood and society. 

_Evolutionary thought interprets childhood_

If the democratic movement emphasized the factor of socialadjustment in the school's function, it was the scientific movementof the last half-century which drew attention to infancy as asuperior opportunity for biological adjustment Among all thecontributions of modern evolutionary science to educationalthought, none is, more striking or more far-reaching in itsimplications than that special group of generalizations whichstates the biological function of a prolonged infancy in man. Interpreting this period, of helplessness and dependence as one ofplasticity and opportunity, it has shown that the greater power ofman in adjusting himself to the complex conditions of life is dueto his educability, which in turn is the outcome of his lengthenedchildhood. This "doctrine of the meaning of infancy, " for such ithas been called, is perhaps best known to the teaching professionthrough those enlargements and applications of the doctrine whichhave been made by Mr. Nicholas Murray Butler in his exposition of"the meaning of education. " As a belief, it is at least as old asthe period of the ancient Greek philosopher, Anaximander. As adoctrine in our modern thought, it owes its influentialreappearance to certain evolutionary hypotheses of Mr. AlfredRussel Wallace, which in turn stimulated Mr. John Fiske to thatfurther inquiry which resulted in those first cogent and extendedstatements of the doctrine which have been the basis of so manysubsequent educational applications. 

_Mr. Fiske's presentation of the meaning of infancy_

Because of the fundamental importance of Mr. Fiske's presentationof "the doctrine of the meaning of infancy, " his views are herereprinted in detail. The material consists of an essay and anaddress. The first of these, "The Meaning of Infancy, " is a briefand simplified restatement of those theories of man's origin anddestiny as first suggested in his lectures at Harvard University in1871, and later developed more fully in the "Outlines of CosmicPhilosophy, " part II, chapters xvi, xxi, and xxii. The second ofthese, "The Part played by Infancy in the Evolution of Man, " is anaddress delivered by Mr. Fiske as the guest of honor at a dinner atthe Aldine Club, New York, May 13, 1895. Together these two papersconstitute the most detailed and valuable elucidation of thedoctrine that we possess. In offering them to the teachingprofession and the reading public in this form, it is with thesincere hope that this biological interpretation of childhood andeducation will lend a new spiritual dignity to the wholeinstitution of education. It must certainly be gratifying to thosewho are profound believers in the efficacy of education, to notethat its significance is wider than its service to particularpersons and states; that education is, in truth, the conscious andlatest mode of that wider world-evolution which has been inprogress since the beginning of time. 

I

THE MEANING OF INFANCY

What is the Meaning of Infancy? What is the meaning of the factthat man is born into the world more helpless than any othercreature, and needs for a much longer season than any other livingthing the tender care and wise counsel of his elders? It is one ofthe most familiar of facts that man alone among animals, exhibits acapacity for progress. That man is widely different from otheranimals in the length of his adolescence and the utter helplessnessof his babyhood, is an equally familiar fact. Now between thesetwo commonplace facts is there any connection? Is it a mereaccident that the creature which is distinguished as progressiveshould also be distinguished as coming slowly to maturity, or isthere a reason lying deep down in the nature of things why thisshould be so? I think it can be shown, with very few words, thatbetween these two facts there is a connection that is deeplyin-wrought with the processes by which life has been evolved uponthe earth. It can be shown that man's progressiveness and thelength of his infancy are but two sides of one and the same fact;and in showing this, still more will appear. It will appear thatit was the lengthening of infancy which ages ago graduallyconverted our forefathers from brute creatures into humancreatures. It is babyhood that has made man what he is. Thesimple unaided operation of natural selection could never haveresulted in the origination of the human race. Natural selectionmight have gone on forever improving the breed of the highestanimal in many ways, but it could never _unaided_ have started theprocess of civilization or have given to man those peculiarattributes in virtue of which it has been well said that thedifference between him and the highest of apes immeasurablytranscends in value the difference between an ape and a blade ofgrass. In order to bring about that wonderful event, the Creationof Man, natural selection had to call in the aid of other agencies, and the chief of these agencies was the gradual lengthening ofbabyhood. 

Such is the point which I wish to illustrate in few words, and toindicate some of its bearings on the history of human progress. Let us first observe what it was then lengthened the infancy of thehighest animal, for then we shall be the better able to understandthe character of the prodigious effects which this infancy haswrought. A few familiar facts concerning the method in which menlearn how to do things will help us here. 

When we begin to learn to play the piano, we have to devote muchtime and thought to the adjustment and movement of our fingers andto the interpretation of the vast and complicated multitude ofsymbols which make up the printed page of music that stands beforeus. For a long time, therefore, our attempts are feeble andstammering and they require the full concentrated power of themind. Yet a trained pianist will play a new piece of music atsight, and perhaps have so much attention to spare that he can talkwith you at the same time. What an enormous number of mentalacquisitions have in this case become almost instinctive orautomatic! It is just so in learning a foreign language, and itwas just the same when in childhood we learned to walk, to talk, and to write. It is just the same, too, in learning to think aboutabstruse subjects. What at first strains the attention to theutmost, and often wearies us, comes at last to be done withouteffort and almost unconsciously. Great minds thus travel over vastfields of thought with an ease of which they are themselvesunaware. Dr. Nathaniel Bowditch once said that in translating the"Mecanique Celeste, " he had come upon formulas which Laplaceintroduced with the word "obviously, " where it took neverthelessmany days of hard study to supply the intermediate steps throughwhich that transcendent mind had passed with one huge leap ofinference. At some time in his youth no doubt Laplace had to thinkof these things, just as Rubinstein had once to think how hisfingers should be placed on the keys of the piano; but what wasonce the object of conscious attention comes at last to bewell-nigh automatic, while the night of the conscious mind goes onever to higher and vaster themes. 

Let us now take a long leap from the highest level of humanintelligence to the mental life of a turtle or a codfish. In whatdoes the mental life of such creatures consist? It consists of afew simple acts mostly concerned with the securing of food and theavoiding of danger, and these few simple acts are repeated withunvarying monotony during the whole lifetime of these creatures. Consequently these acts are performed with great ease and areattended with very little consciousness, and moreover the capacityto perform them is transmitted from parent to offspring ascompletely as the capacity of the stomach to digest food istransmitted. In all animals the new-born stomach needs but thecontact with food in order to begin digesting, and the new-bornlungs need but the contact with air in order to begin to breathe. The capacity for performing these perpetually repeated visceralactions is transmitted in perfection. All the requisite nervousconnections are fully established during the brief embryonicexistence of each creature. In the case of lower animals it isalmost as much so with the few simple actions which make up thecreature's mental life. The bird known as the fly-catcher nosooner breaks the egg than it will snap at and catch a fly. Thisaction is not so very simple, but because it is something the birdis always doing, being indeed one out of the very few things thatthis bird ever does, the nervous connections needful for doing itare all established before birth, and nothing but the presence ofthe fly is required to set the operation going. 

With such creatures as the codfish, the turtle, or the fly-catcher, there is accordingly nothing that can properly be called infancy. With them the sphere of education is extremely limited. They gettheir education before they are born. In other words, hereditydoes everything for them, education nothing. The career of theindividual is predetermined by the careers of his ancestors, and hecan do almost nothing to vary it. The life of such creatures isconservatism cut and dried, and there is nothing progressive aboutthem. 

In what I just said I left an "almost. " There is a great deal ofsaving virtue in that little adverb. Doubtless even animals low inthe scale possess some faint traces of educability; but they are sovery slight that it takes geologic ages to produce an appreciableresult. In all the innumerable wanderings, fights, upturnings andcataclysms of the earth's stupendous career, each creature has beensummoned under penalty of death to use what little wit he may havehad, and the slightest trace of mental flexibility is of suchpriceless value in the struggle for existence that naturalselection must always have seized upon it, and sedulously hoardedand transmitted it for coming generations to strengthen andincrease. With the lapse of geologic time the upper grades ofanimal intelligence have doubtless been raised higher and higherthrough natural selection. The warm-blooded mammals and birds ofto-day no doubt surpass the cold-blooded dinosaurs of the Jurassicage in mental qualities as they surpass them in physical structure. From the codfish and turtle of ancient family to the modern lion, dog, and monkey, it is a very long step upward. The mental life ofa warm-blooded animal is a very different affair from that ofreptiles and fishes. A squirrel or a bear does a good many thingsin the course of his life. He meets various vicissitudes invarious ways; he has adventures. The actions he performs are socomplex and so numerous that they are severally performed with lessfrequency than the few actions performed by the codfish. Therequisite nervous connections are accordingly not fully establishedbefore birth. There is not time enough. The nervous connectionsneeded for the visceral movements and for the few simpleinstinctive actions get organized, and then the creature is bornbefore he has learned how to do all the things his parents coulddo. A good many of his nervous connections are not yet formed, they are only formable. Accordingly he is not quite able to takecare of himself; he must for a time be watched and nursed. Allmammals and most birds have thus a period of babyhood that is notvery long, but is on the whole longest with the most intelligentcreatures. It is especially long with the higher monkeys, andamong the man-like apes it becomes so long as to be strikinglysuggestive. An infant orang-outang, captured by Mr. Wallace, wasstill a helpless baby at the age of three months, unable to feeditself, to walk without aid, or to grasp objects with precision. 

But this period of helplessness has to be viewed under anotheraspect. It is a period of plasticity. The creature's career is nolonger exclusively determined by heredity. There is a period afterbirth when its character can be slightly modified by what happensto it after birth, that is, by its experience as an individual. Itbecomes educable. It is no longer necessary for each generation tobe exactly like that which has preceded. A door is opened throughwhich the capacity for progress can enter. Horses and dogs, bearsand elephants, parrots and monkeys, are all teachable to someextent, and we have even heard of a learned pig. Of learned assesthere has been no lack in the world. 

But this educability of the higher mammals and birds is after allquite limited. By the beginnings of infancy the door forprogressiveness was set ajar, but it was not all at once thrownwide open. Conservatism stilt continued in fashion. Onegeneration of cattle is much like another. It would be easy forfoxes to learn to climb frees, and many a fox might have saved hislife by doing so; yet quickwitted as he is, this obvious devicenever seems to have occurred to Reynard. Among slightly teachablemammals, however, there is one group more teachable than the rest. Monkeys, with their greater power of handling things, have alsomore inquisitiveness and more capacity for sustained attention thanany other mammals; and the higher apes are fertile in variedresources. The orang-outang and gorilla are for this reasondreaded by other animals, and roam the undisputed lords of theirnative forests. They have probably approached the critical pointwhere variations in intelligence, always important, have come to besupremely important, so as to be seized by natural selection inpreference to variations in physical constitution. At some remoteepoch of the past--we cannot say just when or how--our half-humanforefathers reached and passed this critical point, and forthwiththeir varied struggles began age after age to result in thepreservation of bigger and better brains, while the rest of theirbodies changed but little. This particular work of naturalselection must have gone on for an enormous length of time, and asits result we see that while man remains anatomically much like anape, be has acquired a vastly greater brain with all that thisimplies. Zoologically the distance is small between man and thechimpanzee; psychologically it has become so great as to beimmeasurable. 

But this steady increase of intelligence, as our forefathers beganto become human, carried with it a steady prolongation of infancy. As mental life became more complex and various, as the things to belearned kept ever multiplying, less and less could be done beforebirth, more and more must be left to be done in the earlier yearsof life. So instead of being born with a few simple capacitiesthoroughly organized, man came at last to be born with the germs ofmany complex capacities which were reserved to be unfolded andenhanced or checked and stifled by the incidents of personalexperience in each individual. In this simple yet wonderful waythere has been provided for man a long period during which his mindis plastic and malleable, and the length of this period hasincreased with civilization until it now covers nearly one third ofour lives. It is not that our inherited tendencies and aptitudesare not still the main thing. It is only that we have at lastacquired great power to modify them by training, so that progressmay go on with ever-increasing sureness and rapidity. 

In thus pointing out the causes of infancy, we have at the sametime witnessed some of its effects. One effect, of stupendousimportance, remains to be pointed out. As helpless babyhood camemore and more to depend on parental care, the correlated feelingswere developed on the part of parents, and the fleeting sexualrelations established among mammals in general were graduallyexchanged for permanent relations. A cow feels strong maternalaffection for her nursing calf, but after the calf is fully grown, though doubtless she distinguishes it from other members of theherd, it is not clear that she entertains for it any parentalfeeling. But with our half-human forefathers it is not difficultto see how infancy extending over several years must have tendedgradually to strengthen the relations of the children to themother, and eventually to both parents, and thus give rise to thepermanent organization of the family. When this step wasaccomplished we may say that the Creation of Man had been achieved. For through the organization of the family has arisen that of theclan or tribe, which has formed, as it were, the cellular tissueout of which the most complex human society has come to beconstructed. And out of that subordination of individual desiresto the common interest, which first received a definite directionwhen the family was formed, there grew the rude beginnings of humanmorality. 

It was thus through the lengthening of his infancy that the highestof animals came to be Man, --a creature with definite socialrelationships and with an element of plasticity in his organizationsuch as has come at last to make his difference from all otheranimals a difference in kind. Here at last there had come upon thescene a creature endowed with the capacity for progress, and a newchapter was thus opened in the history of creation. But it was notto be expected that man should all at once learn how to takeadvantage of this capacity. Nature, which is said to make nojumps, surely did not jump here. The whole history ofcivilization, indeed, is largely the history of man's awkward andstumbling efforts to avail himself of this flexibility of mentalconstitution with which God has endowed him. For many a weary agethe progress men achieved was feeble and halting. Though it hadceased to be physically necessary for each generation to treadexactly in the steps of its predecessor, yet the circumstances ofprimitive society long made it very difficult for any deviation tobe effected. For the tribes of primitive men were perpetually atwar with each other, and their methods of tribal discipline weremilitary methods. To allow much freedom of thought would beperilous, and the whole tribe was supposed to be responsible forthe words and deeds of each of its members. The tribes mostrigorous in this stern discipline were those which killed outtribes more loosely organized, and thus survived to hand down tocoming generations their ideas and their methods. From this stateof things an intense social conservatism was begotten, --a strongdisposition on the part of society to destroy the flexible-mindedindividual who dares to think and behave differently from hisfellows. During the past three thousand years much has been doneto weaken this conservatism by putting an end to the state ofthings which produced it. As great and strong societies havearisen, as the sphere of warfare has diminished while the sphere ofindustry has enlarged, the need for absolute conformity has ceasedto be felt, while the advantages of freedom and variety come to beever more clearly apparent. At a late stage of civilization, theflexible or plastic society acquires even a military advantage overthe society that is more rigid, as in the struggle between Frenchand English civilization for primacy in the world. In our owncountry, the political birth of which dates from the triumph ofEngland in that mighty struggle, the element of plasticity in man'snature is more thoroughly heeded, more fully taken account of, thanin any other community known to history; and herein lies the chiefpotency of our promise for the future. We have come to the pointwhere we are beginning to see that we may safely depart fromunreasoning routine, and, with perfect freedom of thinking inscience and in religion, with new methods of education that shalltrain our children to think for themselves while they interrogateNature with a courage and an insight that shall grow ever bolderand keener, we may ere long be able fully to avail ourselves of thefact that we come into the world as little children withundeveloped powers wherein lie latent all the boundlesspossibilities of a higher and grander Humanity than has yet beenseen upon the earth. 

II

THE PART PLAYED BY INFANCY IN THE EVOLUTION OF MAN

The remarks which my friend Mr. Clark has made with reference tothe reconciling of science and religion seem to carry me back tothe days when I first became acquainted with the fact that therewere such things afloat in the world as speculations about theorigin of man from lower forms of life; and I can recall step bystep various stages in which that old question has come to have adifferent look from what it had thirty years ago. One of thecommonest objections we used to hear, from the mouths of personswho could not very well give voice to any other objection, was thatanybody, whether he knows much or little about evolution, must havethe feeling that there is something degrading about being alliedwith lower forms of life. That was, I suppose, owing to thesurvival of the old feeling that a dignified product of creationought to have been produced in some exceptional way. That whichwas done in the ordinary way, that which was done through ordinaryprocesses of causation, seemed to be cheapened and to lose itsvalue. It was a remnant of the old state of feeling which tookpleasure in miracles, which seemed to think that the object ofthought was more dignified if you could connect it with somethingsupernatural; that state of culture in which there was analtogether inadequate appreciation of the amount of grandeur thatthere might be in the slow creative work that goes on noiselesslyby little minute increments, even as the dropping of the water thatwears away the stone. The general progress of familiarity with theconception of evolution has done a great deal to change that stateof mind. Even persons who have not much acquaintance with sciencehave at length caught something of its lesson, --that the infinitelycumulative action of small causes like those which we know iscapable of producing results of the grandest and most thrillingimportance, and that the disposition to recur to the cataclysmicand miraculous is only a tendency of the childish mind which we areoutgrowing with wider experience. 

The whole doctrine of evolution, and in fact the whole advance ofmodern science from the days of Copernicus down to the present day, have consisted in the substitution of processes which are familiarand the application of those processes, showing how they producegreat results. 

When Darwin's "Origin of Species" was first published, when it gaveus that wonderful explanation of the origin of forms of life fromallied forms through the operation of natural selection, it musthave been like a mental illumination to every person whocomprehended it. But after all it left a great many questionsunexplained, as was natural. It accounted for the phenomena oforganic development in general with wonderful success, but it musthave left a great many minds with the feeling: If man has beenproduced in this way, if the mere operation of natural selectionhas produced the human race, wherein is the human race anywayessentially different from lower races? Is not man reallydethroned, taken down from that exceptional position in which wehave been accustomed to place him, and might it not be possible, inthe course of the future, for other beings to come upon the earthas far superior to man as man is superior to the fossilized dragonsof Jurassic antiquity?

Such questions used to be asked, and when they were asked, althoughone might have a very strong feeling that it was not so, at thesame time one could not exactly say why. One could not then findany scientific argument for objections to that point of view. Butwith the further development of the question the whole subjectbegan gradually to wear a different appearance; and I am going togive you a little bit of autobiography, because I think it may beof some interest in this connection. I am going to mention two orthree of the successive stages which the whole question took in myown mind as one thing came up after another, and how from time totime it began to dawn upon me that I had up to that point beenlooking at the problem from not exactly the right point of view. 

When Darwin's "Descent of Man" was published in 1871, it was ofcourse a book characterized by all his immense learning, hiswonderful fairness of spirit and fertility of suggestion. Still, one could not but feel that it did not solve the question of theorigin of man. There was one great contrast between that book andhis "Origin of Species. " In the earlier treatise he undertook topoint out a _vera causa_ of the origin of species, and he did it. In his "Descent of Man" he brought together a great many minorgeneralizations which facilitated the understanding of man'sorigin. But he did not come at all near to solving the centralproblem, nor did he anywhere show clearly why natural selectionmight not have gone on forever producing one set of beings afteranother distinguishable chiefly by physical differences. ButDarwin's co-discoverer, Alfred Russel Wallace, at an early stage inhis researches, struck out a most brilliant and pregnantsuggestion. In that one respect Wallace went further than everDarwin did. It was a point of which, indeed, Darwin admitted theimportance. It was a point of which nobody could fail tounderstand the importance, that in the course of the evolution of avery highly organized animal, if there came a point at which it wasof more advantage to that animal to have variations in hisintelligence seized upon and improved by natural selection than tohave physical changes seized upon, then natural selection wouldbegin working almost exclusively upon that creature's intelligence, and he would develop in intelligence to a great extent, while hisphysical organism would change but slightly. Now, that of courseapplied to the case of man, who is changed physically but veryslightly from the apes, while he has traversed intellectually sucha stupendous chasm. 

As soon as this statement was made by Wallace, it seemed to me toopen up an entirely new world of speculation. There was thisenormous antiquity of man, during the greater part of which he didnot know enough to make history. We see man existing here on theearth, no one can say how long, but surely many hundreds ofthousands of years, yet only during just the last little fringe offour or five thousand years has he arrived at the point where hemakes history. Before that, something was going on, a great manythings were going on, while his ancestors were slowly growing up tothat point of intelligence where it began to make itself felt inthe recording of events. This agrees with Wallace's suggestion ofa long period of psychical change, accompanied by slight physicalchange. 

Well, in the spring of 1871, when Darwin's "Descent of Man" cameout, just about the same time I happened to be reading Wallace'saccount of his experiences in the Malay Archipelago, and how at onetime he caught a female orang-outang with a new-born baby, and themother died, and Wallace brought up the baby orang-outang by hand;and this baby orang-outang had a kind of infancy which was a greatdeal longer than that of a cow or a sheep, but it was nothingcompared to human infancy in length. This little orang-outangcould not get up and march around, as mammals of less intelligencedo, when he was first born, or within three or four days; but afterthree or four weeks or so he would get up, and begin taking hold ofsomething and pushing it around, just as children push a chair; andhe went through a period of staring at his hands, as human babiesdo, and altogether was a good deal slower in getting to the pointwhere he could take care of himself. And while I was reading ofthat I thought, Dear me! if there is any one thing in which thehuman race is signally distinguished from other mammals, it is inthe enormous duration of their infancy; but it is a point that I donot recollect ever seeing any naturalist so much as allude to. 

It happened at just that time that I was making researches inpsychology about the organization of experiences, the way in whichconscious intelligent action can pass down into quasi-automaticaction, the generation of instincts, and various allied questions;and I thought, Can it be that the increase of intelligence in ananimal, if carried beyond a certain point, must necessarily resultin prolongation of the period of infancy, --must necessarily resultin the birth of the mammal at a less developed stage, leavingsomething to be done, leaving a good deal to be done, after birth?And then the argument seemed to come along very naturally, that forevery action of life, every adjustment which a creature makes inlife, whether a muscular adjustment or an intelligent adjustment, there has got to be some registration effected in the nervoussystem, some line of transit worn for nervous force to follow;there has got to be a connection between certain nerve-centresbefore the thing can be done, whether it is the acts of the visceraor the acts of the limbs, or anything of that sort; and of courseit is obvious that if the creature has not many things to registerin his nervous system, if he has a life which is very simple, consisting of few actions that are performed with great frequency, that animal becomes almost automatic in his whole life; and all thenervous connections that need to be made to enable him to carry onlife get made during the foetal period or during the egg period, and when he comes to be born, he comes all ready to go to work. Asone result of this, he does not learn from individual experience, but one generation is like the preceding generations, with here andthere some slight modifications. But when you get the creaturethat has arrived at the point where his experience has becomevaried, he has got to do a good many things, and there is more orless individuality about them; and many of them are not performedwith the same minuteness and regularity, so that there does notbegin to be that automatism within the period during which he isbeing developed and his form is taking on its outlines. Duringprenatal life there is not time enough for all these nervousregistrations, and so by degrees it comes about that he is bornwith his nervous system perfectly capable only of making himbreathe and digest food, --of making him do the things absolutelyrequisite for supporting life; instead of being born with a certainnumber of definite developed capacities, he has a number ofpotentialities which have got to be roused according to his ownindividual experience. Pursuing that line of thought, it beganafter a while to seem clear to me that the infancy of the animal ina very undeveloped condition, with the larger part of his facultiesin potentiality rather than in actuality, was a direct result ofthe increase of intelligence, and I began to see that now we havetwo steps: first, natural selection goes on increasing theintelligence; and secondly, when the intelligence goes far enough, it makes a longer infancy, a creature is born less developed, andtherefore there comes this plastic period during which he is moreteachable. The capacity for progress begins to come in, and youbegin to get at one of the great points in which man isdistinguished from the lower animals, for one of those points isundoubtedly his progressiveness; and I think that any one will say, with very little hesitation, that if it were not for our period ofinfancy we should not be progressive. If we came into the worldwith our capacities all cut and dried, one generation would be verymuch like another. 

Then, looking round to see what are the other points which are mostimportant in which man differs from the lower animals, there comesthat matter of the family. The family has adumbrations andforeshadowings among the lower animals, but in general it may besaid that while mammals lower than man are gregarious, in man havebecome established those peculiar relationships which constitutewhat we know as the family; and it is easy to see how the existenceof helpless infants would bring about just that state of things. The necessity of caring for the infants would prolong the period ofmaternal affection, and would tend to keep the father and motherand children together, but it would tend especially to keep themother and children together. This business of the maritalrelations was not really a thing that became adjusted in theprimitive ages of man, but it has become adjusted in the course ofcivilization. Real monogamy, real faithfulness of the male parent, belongs to a comparatively advanced stage; but in the early stagesthe knitting together of permanent relations between mother andinfant, and the approximation toward steady relations on the partof the male parent, came to bring about the family, and graduallyto knit those organizations which we know as clans. 

Here we come to another stage, another step forward. The instantsociety becomes organized in clans, natural selection cannot letthese clans be broken up and die out, --the clan becomes the chiefobject or care of natural selection, because if you destroy it youretrograde again, you lose all you have gained; consequently, thoseclans in which the primeval selfish instincts were so modified thatthe individual conduct would be subordinated to some extent to theneeds of the clan, --those are the ones which would prevail in thestruggle for life. In this way you gradually get an externalstandard to which man has to conform his conduct, and you get thegerms of altruism and morality; and in the prolonged affectionaterelation between the mother and the infant you get the opportunityfor that development of altruistic feeling which, once started inthose relations, comes into play in the more general relations, andmakes more feasible and more workable the bonds which keep societytogether, and enable it to unite on wider and wider terms. 

So it seems that from a very small beginning we are reaching a veryconsiderable result. I had got these facts pretty clearly workedout, and carried them around with me some years, before a, freshconclusion came over me one day with a feeling of surprise. In theold days before the Copernican astronomy was promulgated, manregarded himself as the centre of the universe. He used toentertain theological systems which conformed to his limitedknowledge of nature. The universe seemed to be made for his uses, the earth seemed to have been fitted up for his dwelling place, heoccupied the centre of creation, the sun was made to give himlight, etc. When Copernicus overthrew that view, the effect upontheology was certainly tremendous. I do not believe that justicehas ever been done to the shock that it gave to man when he wasmade to realize that he occupied a kind of miserable little clod ofdirt in the universe, and that there were so many other worldsgreater than this. It was one of the first great shocks involvedin the change from ancient to modern scientific views, and I do notdoubt it was responsible for a great deal of the pessimisticphilosophizing that came in the seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies. 

Now, it flashed upon me a dozen years or so ago--after thinkingabout this manner in which man originated--that man occupiescertainly just as exceptional a position as before, if he is theterminal in a long series of evolutionary events. If at the end ofthe long history of evolution comes man, if this whole secularprocess has been going on to produce this supreme object, it doesnot much matter what kind of a cosmical body he lives on. He isput back into the old position of theological importance, and in amuch more intelligent way than in the old days when he was supposedto occupy the centre of the universe. We are enabled to say thatwhile there is no doubt of the evolutionary process going onthroughout countless ages which we know nothing about, yet in theone case where it is brought home to us we spell out anintelligible story, and we do find things working along up to manas a terminal fact in the whole process. This is indeed aconsistent conclusion from Wallace's suggestion that naturalselection, in working toward the genesis of man, began to follow anew path and make psychical changes instead of physical changes. Obviously, here you are started upon a new chapter in the historyof the universe. It is no longer going to be necessary to shapenew limbs, and to thicken the skin and make new growths of hair, when man has learned how to build a fire, when he can take someother animal's hide and make it into clothes. You have got to anew state of things. 

After I had put together all these additional circumstances withregard to the origination of human society and the development ofaltruism, I began to see a little further into the matter. It thenbegan to appear that not only is man the terminal factor in a longprocess of evolution, but in the origination of man there began thedevelopment of the higher psychical attributes, and thoseattributes are coming to play a greater and greater part in thedevelopment of the human race. Just take this mere matter of"altruism, " as we call it. It is not a pretty word, but must servefor want of a better. In the development of altruism from the lowpoint, where there was scarcely enough to hold the clan together, up to the point reached at the present day, there has been anotable progress, but there is still room for an enormous amount ofimprovement. The progress has been all in the direction ofbringing out what we call the higher spiritual attributes. Thefeeling was now more strongly impressed upon me than ever, that allthese things tended to set the whole doctrine of evolution intoharmony with religion; that if the past through which man hadoriginated was such as has been described, then religion was a fitand worthy occupation for man, and some of the assumptions whichunderlie every system of religion must be true. For example, withregard to the assumption that what we see of the present life isnot the whole thing; that there is a spiritual side of the questionbeside the material side; that, in short, there is for man a lifeeternal. When I wrote the "Destiny of Man, " all that I ventured tosay was, that it did not seem quite compatible with ordinary commonsense to suppose that so much pains would have been taken toproduce a merely ephemeral result. But since then another argumenthas occurred to me: that just at the time when the human race wasbeginning to come upon the scene, when the germs of morality werecoming in with the family, when society was taking its first start, there came into the human mind--how one can hardly say, but theredid come--the beginnings of a groping after something that liesoutside and beyond the world of sense. That groping after aspiritual world has been going on here for much more than a hundredthousand years, and it has played an enormous part in the historyof mankind, in the whole development of human society. Nobody canimagine what mankind would have been without it up to the presenttime. Either all religion has been a reaching out for a phantomthat does not exist, or a reaching out after something that doesexist, but of which man, with his limited intelligence, has onlybeen able to gain a crude idea. And the latter seems a far moreprobable conclusion, because, if it is not so, it constitutes aunique exception to all the operations of evolution we know about. As a general thing in the whole history of evolution, when you seeany internal adjustment reaching out toward something, it is inorder to adapt itself to something that really exists; and if thereligious cravings of man constitute an exception, they are the onething in the whole process of evolution that is exceptional anddifferent from all the rest. And this is surely an argument ofstupendous and resistless weight. 

I take this autobiographical way of referring to these things, inthe order in which they came before my mind, for the sake ofillustration. The net result of the whole is to put evolution inharmony with religious thought, --not necessarily in harmony withparticular religious dogmas or theories, but in harmony with thegreat religious drift, so that the antagonism which used to appearto exist between religion and science is likely to disappear. So Ithink it will before a great while. If you take the case of someevolutionist like Professor Haeckel, who is perfectly sure thatmaterialism accounts for everything (he has got it all cut anddried and settled; he knows all about it, so that there is reallyno need of discussing the subject!); if you ask the questionwhether it was his scientific study of evolution that really ledhim to such a dogmatic conclusion, or whether it was that hestarted from some purely arbitrary assumption, like the Frenchmaterialists of the eighteenth century, I have no doubt the latterwould be the true explanation. There are a good many people whostart on their theories of evolution with these ultimate questionsall settled to begin with. It was the most natural thing in theworld that after the first assaults of science upon old beliefs, after a certain number of Bible stories and a certain number ofchurch doctrines had been discredited, there should be a school ofmen who in sheer weariness should settle down to scientificresearches, and say, "We content ourselves with what we can proveby the methods of physical science, and we will throw everythingelse overboard. " That was very much the state of mind of thefamous French atheists of the last century. But only think howchaotic nature was to their minds compared to what she is to ourminds to-day. Just think how we have in the present centuryarrived where we can see the bearings of one set of facts in natureas collated with another set of facts, and contrast it with theview which even the greatest of those scientific Frenchmaterialists could take. Consider how fragmentary and how lackingin arrangement was the universe they saw compared with the universewe can see to-day, and it is not strange that to them it could bean atheistic world. That hostility between science and religioncontinued as long as religion was linked hand in hand with theancient doctrine of special creation. But now that the religiousworld has unmoored itself, now that it is beginning to see thetruth and beauty of natural science and to look with friendshipupon conceptions of evolution, I suspect that this temporaryantagonism, which we have fallen into a careless way of regardingas an everlasting antagonism, will come to an end perhaps quickerthan we realize. 

There is one point that is of great interest in this connection, although I can only hint at it. Among the things that happened inthat dim past when man was coming into existence was the increaseof his powers of manipulation; and that was a factor of immenseimportance. Anaxagoras, it is said, wrote a treatise in which hemaintained that the human race would never have become human if ithad not been for the hand. I do not know that there was so verymuch exaggeration about that. It was certainly of greatsignificance that the particular race of mammals whose intelligenceincreased far enough to make it worth while for natural selectionto work upon intelligence alone was the race which had developedhands and could manipulate things. It was a wonderful era in thehistory of creation when that creature could take a club and use itfor a hammer, or could pry up a stone with a stake, thus adding onemore lever to the levers that made up his arm. From that day tothis, the career of man has been that of a person who has operatedupon his environment in a different way from any animal before him. An era of similar importance came probably somewhat later, when manlearned how to build a fire and cook his food; thus initiating thatcourse of culinary development of which we have seen the climax inour dainty dinner this evening. Here was another means of actingupon the environment. Here was the beginning of the working ofendless physical and chemical changes through the application ofheat, just as the first use of the club or the crowbar was thebeginning of an enormous development in the mechanical arts. 

Now, at the same time, to go back once more into that dim past, when ethics and religion, manual art and scientific thought, foundexpression in the crudest form of myths, the aesthetic sense wasgerminating likewise. Away back in the glacial period you findpictures drawn and scratched upon the reindeer's antler, portraitures of mammoths and primitive pictures of the chase; yousee the trinkets, the personal decorations, proving beyond questionthat the aesthetic sense was there. There has been an immenseaesthetic development since then. And I believe that in the futureit is going to mean far more to us than we have yet begun torealize. I refer to the kind of training that comes to mankindthrough direct operation upon his environment, the incarnation ofhis thought, the putting of his ideas into new material relations. This is going to exert powerful effects of a civilizing kind. There is something strongly educational and disciplinary in themere dealing with matter, whether it be in the manual trainingschool, whether it be in carpentry, in overcoming the inherent andtotal depravity of inanimate things, shaping them to your will, andalso in learning to subject yourself to their will (for sometimesyou must do that in order to achieve your conquests; in otherwords, you must humour their habits and proclivities). In all thisthere is a priceless discipline, moral as well as mental, let alonethe fact that, in whatever kind of artistic work a man does, he isdoing that which in the very working has in it an element ofsomething outside of egoism; even if he is doing it for motives notvery altruistic, he is working toward a result the end of which isthe gratification or the benefit of other persons than himself; heis working toward some result which in a measure depends upon theirapproval, and to that extent tends to bring him into closerrelations to his fellow man. 

In the future, to an even greater extent than in the recent past, crude labour will be replaced by mechanical contrivances. The kindof labour which can command its price is the kind which has trainedintelligence behind it. One of the great needs of our time is themultiplication of skilled and special labour. The demand for theproducts of intelligence is far greater than that for mere crudeproducts of labour, and it will be more and more so. For therecomes a time when the latter products have satisfied the limit towhich a man can consume food and drink and shelter, --those thingswhich merely keep the animal alive. But to those things whichminister to the requirements of the spiritual side of a man, thereis almost no limit. The demand one can conceive is well-nighinfinite. One of the philosophical things that have been said, indiscriminating man from the lower animals, is that he is the onecreature who is never satisfied. It is well for him that he is so, that there is always something more for which he craves. To mymind, this fact most strongly hints that man is infinitely morethan a mere animate machine. 

 OUTLINE

 I. THE MEANING OF INFANCY

 1. The relation between progress and infancy 2. Man's method of learning 3. The mental inheritance of animals 4. Infancy and educability of animals 5. Infancy is a period of plasticity 6. Educability varies widely in different creatures 7. Increased intelligence means prolonged infancy 8. The socializing effects of infancy 9. The use of this capacity for progress in the past

 II. THE PART PLAYED BY INFANCY IN THE EVOLUTION OF MAN

 1. The grandeur of natural causation 2. The problem of man's ascendancy 3. Natural selection seizes on intelligence 4. A long infancy characteristic of man 5. A complex life requires a longer infancy 6. Infancy fosters sociability and the family 7. Group life increases the social and moral bonds 8. Spiritual man is evolution's terminal factor 9. Man marks a development along new lines 10. Hand-work in the evolution of intelligence 11. The educational value of aesthetic effort 12. Man's spirituality is prophetic of his destiny