Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 1.djvu/504

 mc gee] THE TREND OF HUMAN PROGRESS 445

union; and herein appears to lie the break between the biotic realm and the human realm, as seen from the standpoint of the phylogenist. Comparison of the activital lines with the lines of psychic development is even more instructive, since the trend is similar; and this correspondence seems at once to define the realm of humanity as coincident with the domain of intellectual- ity, and to extend the law of the cumulation of knowledge over the entire range of the human activities. Under this view, human faculty is seen to transcend the realm of the inorganic, no less completely than the realm of the biotic, in that its funda- mental character rises above the mere indestructibility of matter, even above the simple persistence of motion, in a law of cumula- tive growth ; yet it were but mental atavism to invest this law with mystery, or do else than seek to formulate it in quantitative terms.

The convergent trend of each and every series of human activ- ities bears directly on the much-discussed question of the origin of the genus Homo. It cannot be affirmed too emphatically that critical observations on mankind indicate convergence of somatic and psychic and demotic characters, and that no careful observa- tions indicate divergence of the essential characters of mankind — indeed it is a commonplace fact that all the lines of human culture, like most of the lines of human blood, are blending more or less rapidly and that neither culture nor blood is becoming divergent in any part of the world. The process of blending seems to be cumulative under the law of humanity ; and no shadow of warrant appears for assuming any other trend during the history of human development. It follows that the theory of monogenism is devoid of direct or indirect observational basis, and that the polygenetic theory is supported by the sum of avail- able facts. In view of the evidence, it would appear practically certain that Homo came up independently from a widely distrib- uted protohuman ancestry in at least as many centers as there are races or varieties of his genus ; and the law of cumulative

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