Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/693

 his understanding, but to bethink himself that it were just as easy in the beginning, or now, or at any time, for the omnipotent Creator of matter and its properties to make it think as to make mind think.

Passing from these incidental lessons of humility and reverence, I go on now to show that materialism has its moral lessons, and that these, rightly apprehended, are not at all of a low intellectual and moral order, but, on the contrary, in some respects more elevating than the moral lessons of spiritualism. I shall content myself with two or three of these lessons, not because there are not more of them, but because they will be enough to occupy the space at my disposal.

It is a pretty well accepted scientific doctrine that our far-distant prehistoric ancestors were a very much lower order of beings than we are, even if they did not inherit directly from the monkey; that they were very much like, in conformation, habits, intelligence, and moral feeling, the lowest existing savages; and that we have risen to our present level of being by a slow process of evolution which has been going on gradually through untold generations. Whether or not "through the ages one increasing purpose runs," as the poet has it, it is certainly true that "the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns." Now, when we examine the brain of the lowest savage, whom we need not be too proud to look upon as our ancestor in the flesh—say a native Australian or a Bushman—we find it to be considerably smaller than an ordinary European brain; its convolutions, which are the highest nerve-centers of mind, are decidedly fewer in number, more simple in character, and more symmetrical in arrangement. These are marks of inferiority, for in those things in which it differs from the ordinary European brain it gets nearer in structure to the still much inferior brain of the monkey; it represents, we may say, a stage of development in the long distance which has been traversed between the two. A comparison of the relative brain-weights will give a rude notion of the differences: the brain-weight of an average European male is forty-nine ounces; that of a Bushman is, I believe, about thirty-three ounces; and that of a negro, who comes between them in brain-size, as in intelligence, is forty-four ounces. The small brain-weight of the Bushman is indeed equaled among civilized nations by that of a small-headed or so-called microcephalic idiot. There can be no doubt, then, of a great difference of development between the highest and the lowest existing human brain.

There can be no doubt, furthermore, that the gross differences which there are between the size and development of the brain of a low savage and of an average European, go along with as great differences of intellectual and moral capacities—that lower mental function answers to lower cerebral structure. It is a well-known fact that many savages can not count beyond five, and that they have no words in their vocabulary for the higher qualities of human nature, such as virtue, justice, humanity, and their opposites, vice, injustice, and