first, natural selection goes on increasing the intelligence; and
secondly, when the intelligence goes far enough, it makes a longer
infancy, a creature is born less developed, and therefore there comes
this plastic period during which he is more teachable. The capacity for
progress begins to come in, and you begin to get at one of the great
points in which man is distinguished from the lower animals, for one of
those points is undoubtedly his progressiveness; and I think that any
one will say, with very little hesitation, that if it were not for our
period of infancy we should not be progressive. If we came into the
world with our capacities all cut and dried, one generation would be
very much like another.
Then, looking around to see what are the other points which are most
important in which man differs from the lower animals, there comes that
matter of the family. The family has adumbrations and foreshadowings
among the lower animals, but in general it may be said that while
mammals lower than man are gregarious, in man have become established
those peculiar relationships which constitute what we know as the
family; and it is easy to see how the existence of helpless infants
would bring about just that state of things. The necessity of caring for
the infants would prolong the period of maternal affection, and would
tend to keep the father and mother and children together, but it would
tend especially to keep the mother and children together. This business
of the marital relations was not really a thing that became adjusted in
the primitive ages of man, but it has become adjusted in the course of
civilization. Real monogamy, real faithfulness of the male parent,
belongs to a comparatively advanced stage; but in the earlier stages the
knitting together of permanent relations between mother and infant, and
the approximation toward steady relations on the part of the male
parent, came to bring about the family and gradually to knit those
organizations which we know as clans.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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