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How seriously this has interfered with our progress it is impossible to say. We know that in spite of it the brain has developed in more normal lines under the beneficent action of genetic social forces. A growing industry preached peace to us while church, and state, and school were yet preaching war. Social unity and organic relation are forced upon our consciousness by the facts, while education still hands down the individualistic concepts of far earlier times.

Even in the most rigidly repressed of all lines of growth, the moral perceptions, we can see how social evolution has developed the soul of man in direct opposition to religious traditions. A given stage of brain development is capable of formulating only such and such moral concepts—of postulating only such and such a perception of God.

The current apprehension of God in a given age is accepted as final and forced upon the consciousness of each succeeding age, thus tending to preserve a necessarily inferior standard, and, in preserving it, to check any brain growth tending to its contradiction. This is one of the most conspicuous and persistent of man’s efforts to modify conduct. Faithfully and conscientiously he had striven to maintain the innocent errors of his racial youth as guides to succeeding ages. With every gathered force of established religion, with the growing pressure of education, with the tremendous sanction of parental government, man has always striven to preserve the religious limits of his remote ancestors.