The age of gold, however, of idleness, and peaceful happiness, was far from Bruno's ideal; the reply of Momus to _Otium_ showed that it had not made men virtuous in the golden age any more than the brutes were virtuous now--that men were perhaps originally more stupid than many of the latter; but in their emulation of divine actions and their attempts to satisfy spiritual desires, difficulties had arisen and needs sprung up; through these their minds were sharpened, industries had been discovered, arts invented; and so from day to day out of the depth of the human intellect necessity brought forth new and marvellous inventions.[473] Thus more and more they advance, through pressing and earnest occupation, from the bestial nature, and approximate more and more nearly to the divine. That injustice and vice increase along with industries is only a corollary of the increase of justice and of virtue. If oxen or apes had as much virtue and spirit as man, they would have the same apprehensions, the same passions, and the same vices. So in men those that have in them somewhat of the pig nature, or of the ass or ox nature, are certainly less wicked, not infected by so criminal vices as more highly developed men might be; but they are not for that more virtuous, unless the brutes also are more virtuous than men, being infected with fewer vices.[474] In this generous conception of human progress, and of its spur--solicitude, necessity, pain--Bruno is quite at one with modern theories of human evolution; it can hardly be said, however, that he anticipated the evolution theory so far as it involves an identity of origin for human beings and lower animals. The idea that different human beings express different animal types was not a new one. It means in Bruno that such men have animal souls, but this is not because their bodies have reverted to the animal type. It is the soul that moulds the body and gives, in these cases, the animal expression to the face--the look of wolf, or bear, or fox, or serpent. There is no question of a _physical continuity_ between animal and man, but there is a _psychical continuity_, since a soul which is that of an animal in one generation may become that of a man in another.[475] A much nearer approach to the evolution-theory is to be found in the _Cabala_,[476] where it is said that if a serpent could have its head moulded into that of a man, its tongue widened, its shoulders broadened, arms and hands branching out from it, and, where the tail now is, a pair of legs, it would think, look, breathe, speak, work, and walk just as a man does, for it would be nothing but a man. Or if the reverse process occurred, in a man (_involution_), in place of talking he would hiss, in place of walking he would creep, in place of building a palace he would hollow out a hiding-place for himself. This is not, however, because the body of the one had been transformed into that of the other animal, function following structure; the soul with