in progress since the beginning of time.

I

THE MEANING OF INFANCY

What is the Meaning of Infancy? What is the meaning of the fact that man is born into the world more helpless than any other creature, and needs for a much longer season than any other living thing the tender care and wise counsel of his elders? It is one of the most familiar of facts that man alone among animals, exhibits a capacity for progress. That man is widely different from other animals in the length of his adolescence and the utter helplessness of his babyhood, is an equally familiar fact. Now between these two commonplace facts is there any connection? Is it a mere accident that the creature which is distinguished as progressive should also be distinguished as coming slowly to maturity, or is there a reason lying deep down in the nature of things why this should be so? I think it can be shown, with very few words, that between these two facts there is a connection that is deeply in-wrought with the processes by which life has been evolved upon the earth. It can be shown that man's progressiveness and the length of his infancy are but two sides of one and the same fact; and in showing this, still more will appear. It will appear that it was the lengthening of infancy which ages ago gradually converted our forefathers from brute creatures into human creatures. It is babyhood that has made man what he is. The simple unaided operation of natural selection could never have resulted in the origination of the human race. Natural selection might have gone on forever improving the breed of the highest animal in many ways, but it could never unaided have started the process of civilization or have given to man those peculiar attributes in virtue of which it has been well said that the difference between him and the highest of apes immeasurably transcends in value the difference between an ape and a blade of grass. In order to bring about that wonderful event, the Creation of Man, natural selection had to call in the aid of other agencies, and the chief of these agencies was the gradual lengthening of babyhood.

Such is the point which I wish to illustrate in few words, and to indicate some of its bearings on the history of human progress. Let us first observe what it was then lengthened the infancy of the highest animal, for then we shall be the better able to understand the character of the prodigious effects which this infancy has wrought. A few familiar facts concerning the method in which men learn how to do things will help us here.

When we begin to learn to play the piano, we have to devote much time and thought to the adjustment and movement of our fingers and to the interpretation of the vast and complicated multitude of symbols which make up the printed page of music that stands before us. For a long time, therefore, our attempts are feeble and stammering and they require the full concentrated power of the mind. Yet a trained pianist will play a new piece of music at sight, and perhaps have so much attention to spare that he can talk with you at the same time. What an enormous number of mental acquisitions have in this case become almost instinctive or automatic! It is just so in learning a foreign language, and it was just the same when in childhood we learned to walk, to talk, and to write. It is just the same, too, in learning to think about abstruse subjects. What at first strains the attention to the utmost, and often wearies us, comes at last to be done without effort and almost unconsciously. Great minds thus travel over vast fields of thought with an ease of which they are themselves unaware. Dr. Nathaniel Bowditch once said that in translating the "Mecanique Celeste," he had come upon formulas which Laplace introduced with the word "obviously," where it took nevertheless many days of hard study to supply the intermediate steps through which that transcendent mind had passed with one huge leap of inference. At some time in his youth no doubt Laplace had to think of these things, just as Rubinstein had once to think how his fingers should be placed on the keys of the piano; but what was once the object of conscious attention comes at last to be well-nigh automatic, while the night of the conscious mind goes on ever to higher and vaster themes.

Let us now take a long leap from the highest level of human intelligence to the mental life of a turtle or a codfish. In what does the mental life of such creatures consist? It consists of a few simple acts mostly concerned with the securing of food and the avoiding of danger, and these few simple acts are repeated with unvarying monotony during the whole lifetime of these creatures. Consequently these acts are performed with great ease and are attended with very little consciousness, and moreover the capacity to perform them is transmitted from parent to offspring as completely as the capacity of the stomach to digest food is transmitted. In all animals the new-born stomach needs but the contact with food in order to begin digesting, and the new-born lungs need but the contact with air in order to begin to breathe. The capacity for performing these perpetually repeated visceral actions is transmitted in perfection. All the requisite nervous connections are fully established during the brief embryonic existence of each creature. In the case of lower animals it is almost as much so with the few simple actions which make up the creature's mental life. The bird known as the fly-catcher no sooner breaks the egg than it will snap at and catch a fly. This action is not so very simple, but because it is something the bird is always doing, being indeed one out of the very few things that this bird ever does, the nervous connections needful for doing it are all established before birth, and nothing but the presence of the fly is required to set the operation going.

With such creatures as the codfish, the turtle, or the fly-catcher, there is accordingly nothing that can properly be called infancy. With them the sphere of education is extremely limited. They get their education before they are born. In other words, heredity does everything for them, education nothing. The career of the individual is predetermined by the careers of his ancestors, and he can do almost nothing to vary it. The life of such creatures is conservatism cut and dried, and there is nothing progressive about them.

In what I just said I left an "almost." There is a great deal of saving virtue in that little adverb. Doubtless even animals low in the scale possess some faint traces of educability; but they are so very slight that it takes geologic ages to produce an appreciable result. In all the innumerable wanderings, fights, upturnings and cataclysms of the earth's stupendous career, each creature has been summoned under penalty of death to use what little wit he may have had, and the slightest trace of mental flexibility is of such priceless value in the struggle for existence that natural selection must always have seized upon it, and sedulously hoarded and transmitted it for coming generations to strengthen and increase. With the lapse of geologic time the upper grades of animal intelligence have doubtless been raised higher and higher through natural selection. The warm-blooded mammals and birds of to-day no doubt surpass the cold-blooded dinosaurs of the Jurassic age in mental qualities as they surpass them in physical structure. From the codfish and turtle of ancient family to the modern lion, dog, and monkey, it is a very long step upward. The mental life of a warm-blooded animal is a very different affair from that of reptiles and fishes. A squirrel or a bear does a good many things in the course of his life. He meets various vicissitudes in various ways; he has adventures. The actions he performs are so complex and so numerous that they are severally performed with less frequency than the few actions