Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/642

630 and developed normally under its influence. And thus was built up, cell upon cell, the enlarged brain of the highest animals, and especially of man, who seems to have been the first to reach the point where mental forces completely gained the mastery over physical ones, so that the only advantageous qualities worth mentioning were those that helped him to foresee, circumvent, and outwit the rest of creation. The evolving intellect throughout all this long presocial and premoral period was exclusively devoted to the egoistic interests of individuals, acquiring sagacity, shrewdness, and tact, and exercising cunning, craft, strategy and diplomacy in attaining its ends.

But this cunning was not wholly applied to animate things. A large stream of it took the direction of circumventing and taming the physical forces of nature. Cunning thus applied was called ingenuity and resulted in invention. This proved the most advantageous use to which the new agency could be put, and led to the development of the arts. Man may have been gregarious before there were any arts, but he can scarcely be said to have been social. Society, in its modern acceptation, must have originated simultaneously with the earliest form of art. We can scarcely conceive of art without society or society without art. The development of society has been the development of art, and human civilization has advanced through all the stages of culture into which ethnologists subdivide it as the result of successive advances in the perfection of the arts.

We are not now dealing with art but with mind, and our point of view makes it clear that the intellect in its primary characteristics was thoroughly practical in the sense that those races in which it was best developed were the fittest to survive, and this is all that the biologic law requires to account for the increase of an organ or faculty. It is also apparent that it has never lost this quality, and that the law was applicable throughout the human period, that it has operated during the historic period as fully as in the prehistoric, and that, in a much modified form, it may be said to be still in operation even in the most advanced races. The intellect is still an advantageous attribute in the