The evolution of mind / by Joseph McCabe.

  • Joseph McCabe
Date:
1910
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The evolution of mind / by Joseph McCabe. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    296/316 page 272
    tips of the continents, in sheltered forests, and in detached islands, we find these races to-day, shrink- ing from the advancing culture of the world. A glance at the map explains the primitive culture of the Veddahs, Andamanese, Aetas, Tasmanians, Bushmen, low central Africans, and Yahgans. The Australians and Melanesians represent a second wave, isolated at the next stage of culture and (in the former case) lacking stimulus to progress for, possibly, a hundred thousand years. When this stimulus has been long removed, the brain ceases to be educable (in the race—individual variations may occur). The skull closes firmly over the brain, to give a compensating strength for the expansibility which is no longer needed. The child of the black learns easily, but at puberty the skull closes and arrests growth. It is the same arrest of brain- expansion as in the anthropoid ape. On these principles we can understand the steady advance of mind under civilisation. ‘There is no intrinsic principle of progress in arace. Just as we have found throughout the whole story, there must be possibility of progress within—selectable varia- tions—but the stimulus to progress is without. A nation may advance slowly owing to the clash of individual minds within its frontiers. The conser- vatism of human organisations usually prevents this, however, and the nation is very generally doomed to stagnation, if it have impenetrable frontiers. In this light we may glance at the civilisations of the east before we trace the stream of European cul-
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