capacities which were reserved to be unfolded and enhanced or checked and stifled by the incidents of personal experience in each individual.  In this simple yet wonderful way there has been provided for man a long period during which his mind is plastic and malleable, and the length of this period has increased with civilization until it now covers nearly one third of our lives.  It is not that our inherited tendencies and aptitudes are not still the main thing.  It is only that we have at last acquired great power to modify them by training, so that progress may go on with ever-increasing sureness and rapidity.

In thus pointing out the causes of infancy, we have at the same time witnessed some of its effects.  One effect, of stupendous importance, remains to be pointed out.  As helpless babyhood came more and more to depend on parental care, the correlated feelings were developed on the part of parents, and the fleeting sexual relations established among mammals in general were gradually exchanged for permanent relations.  A cow feels strong maternal affection for her nursing calf, but after the calf is fully grown, though doubtless she distinguishes it from other members of the herd, it is not clear that she entertains for it any parental feeling.  But with our half-human forefathers it is not difficult to see how infancy extending over several years must have tended gradually to strengthen the relations of the children to the mother, and eventually to both parents, and thus give rise to the permanent organization of the family.  When this step was accomplished we may say that the Creation of Man had been achieved.  For through the organization of the family has arisen that of the clan or tribe, which has formed, as it were, the cellular tissue out of which the most complex human society has come to be constructed.  And out of that subordination of individual desires to the common interest, which first received a definite direction when the family was formed, there grew the rude beginnings of human morality.

It was thus through the lengthening of his infancy that the highest of animals came to be Man,—­a creature with definite social relationships and with an element of plasticity in his organization such as has come at last to make his difference from all other animals a difference in kind.  Here at last there had come upon the scene a creature endowed with the capacity for progress, and a new chapter was thus opened in the history of creation.  But it was not to be expected that man should all at once learn how to take advantage of this capacity.  Nature, which is said to make no jumps, surely did not jump here.  The whole history of civilization, indeed, is largely the history of man’s awkward and stumbling efforts to avail himself of this flexibility of mental constitution with which God has endowed him.  For many a weary age the progress men achieved was feeble and halting.  Though it had ceased to be physically necessary for each generation to tread