SOCLAL EVOLUTION. Up to a certain stage of de velopment—that of the lowest savagery—the evo lution of man was due to the action of the same transforming factors as affected lower organic life. The struggle for life, for food, for place, for preeminence, was, however, stronger in the human species than among the animals. Primi tive man, his animal passions enhanced by his powerful emotions, stimulated by his growing imagination, his dawning intellectual forces, and his growing self-consciousness, rendered this new creature more cruel, bloodthirsty, and revengeful than the beasts. At first war did not tend to nation-building, but was a sporadic outbreak of intertribal inherited hate and revenge, with little result other than brutal sport and exercise. Alar riage was little more than animal mating. owner ship in property eommunal, and the primitive spoken language had not arisen out of signs and gestures, through picture-writing, into rude al phabets and a written language.
As soon as some scattered tribes had adopted a stationary mode of life, began to cultivate the soil, had domestic ;Inimals, and through various necessities made useful inventions, man began to live in a world of new ideas. With fixed abodes, family and tribal customs became handed down, finally hemming laws, and as the result of tribal combats patriotism and the social virtues took root. With aneestor-worship, reverence for
the dead, ideas of a future life. poetry, art, archi tecture. sprang up. Commerce was, even in the earliest ages, as now, a great eivilizer, as was ownership in flocks and herds :Ind in lhnd. Man began to have his individual rights, and the germs of morality, or the right relations between man and man, gradually evolved.
As the population of a given tribe or aggre gate of tribes increased, there ensued a differen tiation of the trades and arts, a separation into political and religious classes, and finally a de gree of civilization, of which the Egyptian type was the earliest, in which an alphabet gradually replaced hieroglyphics, and a complicated reli gions ceremonial and theology superseded savage rites. The new man, with his moral nature en hanced, his imagination aroused, his memories of the past handed down by poets and scalds, his thoughts turning upward and away from ani mal existence, became gradually, in the noblest specimens of his race, actuated by entirely new sets of ideas, and the factors of his moral devel• opment began to act with increasing force.