mcgee] THE TREND OF HUMAN PROGRESS 403
confident declaration that there is no current — that the vital forms were fixed by fiat in the beginning to persist unchanged for ever and ever ; later a red-skin man, full of the lore of his race, assured me that the animals of the long ago were vastly larger and wiser than the present pygmies, and that the future •darkened toward annihilation ; but afterward actual workers in experience of vitality mirrored that experience in their own minds, and pointed out a trend of vital development from the low toward the high, from dulness toward brightness, from mind- less groveling toward intellectual uprightness. When I sought the current of human progress my earlier guides averred, with a conviction transcending experience, that man began little lower than the angels, and — save for an elect few — was lapsing toward the depths of eternal despair, or perchance drifting toward the annihilation awaiting the beasts in the dusky philosopher's gloomy faith ; other guides were hopeful that those of their cult might possess the earth ; but until within half a lifetime there were few who had the courage to stem the stream of experience with respect to man himself and learn the actual set of the cur- rent. The direction of flow of the Mississippi might have been learned from practical boatmen ; and it is meet to inquire whether the trend of human progress may not be gained from actual workers in man's experience of Man.
The scientific study of Man grew out of research among lower organisms; and at first the lines and methods of inquiry in biology and anthropology were alike. Gradually the searcher perceived that the genus Homo, albeit animal, is something more. At first he feared his distinction was but a vestige of the classical division of the genus into the real species sapiens and the mythic species brutus, or else an echo of the medieval exal- tation of spirituality, and so he touched lightly on those essential and fundamental features that demark man from his ancestral brutes no less strongly than these are demarked from the min-
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