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 awkw