short of the relations between individuals in the rudest human society.
The primordial unit of human society is the family, and it was by the
establishment of definite and permanent family relationships that the
step was taken which raised Man socially above the level of gregarious
apehood. This great point was attained through that lengthening of the
period of helpless childhood which accompanied the gradually increasing
intelligence of our half-human ancestors. When childhood had come to
extend over a period of ten or a dozen years--a period which would be
doubled, or more than doubled, where several children were born in
succession to the same parents--the relationships between father and
mother, brethren and sisters, must have become firmly knit; and thus the
family, the unit of human society, gradually came into existence.[11]
The rudimentary growth of moral sentiment must now have received a
definite direction. As already observed, with the beginnings of infancy
in the animal world there came the genesis in the parents of feelings
and actions not purely self-regarding. Rudimentary sympathies, with
rudimentary capacity for self-devotion, are witnessed now and then among
higher mammals, such as the dog, and not uncommonly among apes. But as
the human family, with its definite relationships, came into being,
there must necessarily have grown up between its various members
reciprocal necessities of behaviour. The conduct of the individual could
no longer be shaped with sole reference to his own selfish desires, but
must be to a great extent subordinated to the general welfare of the
family. And in judging of the character of his own conduct, the
individual must now begin to refer it to some law of things outside of
himself; and hence the germs of conscience and of the idea of duty. Such
were no doubt the crude beginnings of human morality.

With this genesis of the family, the Creation of Man may be said, in a
certain sense, to have been completed. The great extent of cerebral