LIFE IN OLD EGYPT. 21
the brain with lines drawn to show how far upward the social_ life of man has already progressed and how much more of the higher faculties of the brain remains for us to bring into dominance before we can reach the top and crown in the great archetype of society.
In the full-page Chart of Historic Growth we have supplied such a chart of the brain, mapping out the past history of man with as much detail as the size of the engraving will admit. The middle band, or phase of youth, is shaded by stippling.
In the study of this chart we shall learn that six great forms of civilization have thus far been masters of the world. These were the Egyptian, Mongolian, Hindoo, Semitic, Graeco-Roman, and Christian. But each of these forms was fragmentary. Each of them was dominated or took its cast of character from only a limited region of the brain. It supplied only a part of the wants and aspirations of man. Other regions or faculties of the brain were more or less active but did not determine the national character or course of development.
A mere sketch of these past forms will serve our purpose. It will show their failures and will illustrate by contrast that coming and nobler civilization which is close before us, the age of Harmonism. A true study of evolution surveys the past in order to learn of the future.
EGYPTIAN CIVILIZATION commenced its massive and vigorous growth under the most favorable of external conditions. The mental power and susceptibility varies widely in different races of men. The capacity to develop a civilization is only moderate in some while it is very great in others, just as in some
families n e sec one child with a quick and strong intel
lect while his brothers may be very slow in thinking and learning. In three centuries the descendants of Kam had raised Egyptian civilization to as high a state as the Mon
golian had attained in ten centuries.
This Kamitic growth took a direction which curves backward and downward in the brain. That is the line of arbitrary power and it quickly reached the period of conservatism. It was like the great pylons and pyramids, broad at the base and narrow at the top. The vast temples and palaces proclaimed the absolute and enduring power of kings, priests and nobles. The pylons looked down on hopeless servitude and castes for the people.
Whatever seemed durable, massive and useful, impressed the Egyptian mind. Their genius was practical, not speculative. It was life, and not philosophy, in which they were most interested. With these Egyptians, Science only meant a collection of surface facts, with rules for the various arts and handcrafts. If their ideas, their art and their science be compared with the standard of modern times, then their old knowledge seems very rude indeed.
The sculptured faces and human figures on all the oldest of these monuments, indeed on all before the conquest of Cambyses, exhibit the art of sculpture only in its primitive and childish forms. In drawing a profile of the face, their artists made just the same mistakes that the ordinary child makes now. On the profile view of the face they drew a front view of the
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