In the future, to an even greater extent than in the recent past, crude labour will be replaced by mechanical contrivances. The kind of labour which can command its price is the kind which has trained intelligence behind it. One of the great needs of our time is the multiplication of skilled and special labour. The demand for the products of intelligence is far greater than that for mere crude products of labour, and it will be more and more so. For there comes a time when the latter products have satisfied the limit to which a man can consume food and drink and shelter,--those things which merely keep the animal alive. But to those things which minister to the requirements of the spiritual side of a man, there is almost no limit. The demand one can conceive is well-nigh infinite. One of the philosophical things that have been said, in discriminating man from the lower animals, is that he is the one creature who is never satisfied. It is well for him that he is so, that there is always something more for which he craves. To my mind, this fact most strongly hints that man is infinitely more than 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 End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Meaning of Infancy, by John Fiske