Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/10

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ourselves of the heritage of all the ages and assume the primitive rôle of Eoanthropus for example.

Environment presupposes mind, matter, space and time. With these combined in workable proportions it is conceivable how the resultant might be that thing we call human culture. Mind, with its power to register and to profit by its own experiences, is that which has leavened the lump. As long, however, as those accumulated experiences remained individual, there was no real progress. Means had to be devised to translate individual experience into racial experience. The one who discovered this secret, who first deposited that little bank account on which the race has ever since drawn, is entitled to be called the first man.

There were from the beginning as there are to-day individuals with exceptional minds, who contrived to live up to the full measure of the light that was given them, thus contributing little by little to racial experience, which at first could help them very little in return; but which as it grew and as ways were found to make it more generally available became a dominant factor in the racial uplift.