Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/876

 842 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

descent in a new form, viz. : What was the nature of the influences causing a particular species to attain exceptional brain development, culminating in human intelligence? Natural selection and sexual selection account for the proto-human stock, but, as the theory of descent now stands, there they stop and do not account for the develop- ment of humanity.

Upon this problem Mr. Atkinson's speculations throw no light whatever. Indeed, he assumes "the rise of superior intellectual facul- ties" in order to account for the beginning of the process of social integration whose course he describes. The great, the fundamental, problem is thus left out of the reckoning.

The suggestion of greatest promise in regard to the solution of this problem has been advanced by Edward John Payne in his History of the New World Called America? Briefly stated, this suggestion is that man is descended from a simian species, which, becoming converted from arboreal to terrestrial habits of life, was exposed to such vicis- situdes that only those displaying superior capacity for associated effort were able to survive. Hence a social species was evolved by natural selection, just as social species have been evolved in other animal orders. Language was developed from brute outcry as an incident of the life of community, and as an organ of collective activity. The process reacted upon the individual units, thus promoting the development of the brain and the increase of intelligence. Sense of personality was originally collective, and sense of individual personality emerged by a process of analysis. Mr. Payne traces this process in great detail, 2 with copious illustrations drawn from linguistic characteristics. Although he himself does not make the inference, yet the evidence he adduces leads directly to the conclusion that human nature has been formed by the life of the community, just as the nature of the social bees has been formed by the life of the hive.

Mr. Payne bases his theory upon linguistic evidence. It cannot be regarded as established until anthropological, psychological, philologi- cal, and historical data are satisfactorily co-ordinated in support of it. There are lines of favoring evidence in all these fields, but space will not permit more than mere mention, as follows : The physical characters distinguishing the anthropoid apes from man are late phases of ontogeny, resemblance of the embryo forms being much closer in an earlier than in the latest stage. According to the law of biogenic recapitu- lation, the anthropoid apes belong to a stage of individual physical 'Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1899. 2 Vol. II, pp. 105-290.