and vegetal life illustrate the seeming capriciousness of its workings.  Psychical variations have never been unimportant since the appearance of the first faint pigment-spot which by and by was to translate touch into vision, as it developed into the lenses and humours of the eye.[2] Special organs of sense and the lower grades of perception and judgment were slowly developed through countless ages, in company with purely physical variations of shape of foot, or length of neck, or complexity of stomach, or thickness of hide.  At length there came a wonderful moment—­silent and unnoticed, as are the beginnings of all great revolutions.  Silent and unnoticed, even as the day of the Lord which cometh like a thief in the night, there arrived that wonderful moment at which psychical changes began to be of more use than physical changes to the brute ancestor of Man.  Through further ages of ceaseless struggle the profitable variations in this creature occurred oftener and oftener in the brain, and less often in other parts of the organism, until by and by the size of his brain had been doubled and its complexity of structure increased a thousand-fold, while in other respects his appearance was not so very different from that of his brother apes.[3] Along with this growth of the brain, the complete assumption of the upright posture, enabling the hands to be devoted entirely to prehension and thus relieving the jaws of that part of their work, has cooeperated in producing that peculiar contour of head and face which is the chief distinguishing mark of physical Man.  These slight anatomical changes derive their importance entirely from the prodigious intellectual changes in connection with which they have been produced; and these intellectual changes have been accumulated until the distance, psychically speaking, between civilized man and the ape is so great as to dwarf in comparison all that had been achieved in the process of evolution down to the time of our half-human ancestor’s first appearance.  No fact in nature is fraught with deeper meaning than this two-sided fact of the extreme physical similarity and enormous psychical divergence between Man and the group of animals to which he traces his pedigree.  It shows that when Humanity began to be evolved an entirely new chapter in the history of the universe was opened.  Henceforth the life of the nascent soul came to be first in importance, and the bodily life became subordinated to it.  Henceforth it appeared that, in this direction at least, the process of zooelogical change had come to an end, and a process of psychological change was to take its place.  Henceforth along this supreme line of generation there was to be no further evolution of new species through physical variation, but through the accumulation of psychical variations one particular species was to be indefinitely perfected and raised to a totally different plane from that on which all life had hitherto existed.  Henceforth, in short, the dominant aspect of evolution was to be not the genesis of species, but the progress of Civilization.