walk uprightly much as a child learns the same thing. At first he
crawls on all fours, then he clambers, laying hold of whatever he
can; and lastly he stands upright alone and walks, but for a long
time with an unsteady step. So when the human race was in its
gorilla-hood it generally carried a stick; from carrying a stick for
many million years it became accustomed and modified to an upright
position. The stick wherewith it had learned to walk would now serve
to beat its younger brothers, and then it found out its service as a
lever. Man would thus learn that the limbs of his body were not the
only limbs that he could command. His body was already the most
versatile in existence, but he could render it more versatile still.
With the improvement in his body his mind improved also. He learnt
to perceive the moral government under which he held the feudal
tenure of his life--perceiving it he symbolised it, and to this day
our poets and prophets still strive to symbolise it more and more
completely.

The mind grew because the body grew; more things were perceived, more
things were handled, and being handled became familiar. But this
came about chiefly because there was a hand to handle with; without
the hand there would be no handling, and no method of holding and
examining is comparable to the human hand. The tail of an opossum is
a prehensile thing, but it is too far from his eyes; the elephant's
trunk is better, and it is probably to their trunks that the
elephants owe their sagacity. It is here that the bee, in spite of
her wings, has failed. She has a high civilisation, but it is one
whose equilibrium appears to have been already attained; the
appearance is a false one, for the bee changes, though more slowly
than man can watch her; but the reason of the very gradual nature of
the change is chiefly because the physical organisation of the insect