How seriously this has interfered with our progress it is impossible to say. We know that in spite of it the brain has developed in more normal lines under the beneficent action of genetic social forces. A growing industry preached peace to us while church, and state, and school were yet preaching war. Social unity and organic relation are forced upon our consciousness by the facts, while education still hands down the individualistic concepts of far earlier times. Even in the most rigidly repressed of all lines of growth, the moral perceptions, we can see how social evolution has developed the soul of man in direct opposition to religious traditions. A given stage of brain development is capable of formulating only such and such moral concepts—of postulating only such and such a perception of God. The current apprehension of God in a given age is accepted as final and forced upon the consciousness of each succeeding age, thus tending to preserve a necessarily inferior standard, and, in preserving it, to check any brain growth tending to its contradiction. This is one of the most conspicuous and persistent of man’s efforts to modify conduct. Faithfully and conscientiously he had striven to maintain the innocent errors of his racial youth as guides to succeeding ages. With every gathered force of established religion, with the growing pressure of education, with the tremendous sanction of parental government, man has always striven to preserve the religious limits of his remote ancestors. And yet, in spite of all the allied forces of conscious humanity, the evolution of brain tissue went on; the new brains saw larger glimpses of truth and transmitted what they saw to others; those who had ears to hear heard, and the world’s religions have grown and spread under genetic forces, in the face of opposition, persecution, and execution based on telic forces. A clearer and sadder illustration of the attitude of man as a factor in social evolution need not be asked. All that he could do he has done to throttle progress and stop the growth of his own soul; and this under a sublime conviction of virtue. In scientific progress, in artistic development, along all the lines of human growth, we find the majority acting as obstructionists; always valiantly upholding that which has been, and maintaining, as respectable pterodactyls, that mud of a proper consistency is far superior as a vehicle of life to the untried vicissitudes of air. Is it then to be supposed that social evolution would have got along faster without our conscious cerebration? That we might have slid peacefully up the ladder with our eyes shut, instead of struggling on in our toad-in-the-well fashion—up three steps and down two? Surely not. The very fact that this power to alter conduct marks the highest stage of animal evolution proves its value. Nature does not make such huge mistakes as to introduce and maintain an injurious function.