Social superiority, like moral superiority, is the product of evolution. In primitive times when men, in order to live, were limited like animals to gathering the spontaneous fruit of the earth, according to the poetry of the biblical legend, and according to what sociology repeats to-day, the superior man was the one of largest stature, the giant. People paid him homage because he was the most imposing, without troubling themselves to ask whether, or not, he might be insane. In this way Saul was the first king. When the time came that men were no longer content to live on the spontaneous fruit of the earth, but were forced to till the soil, then a new victory was inaugurated, the victory of the more active and intelligent man. David killed Goliath. This great Bible story marks the moment when the superiority of man came to be considered under a more advanced and spiritual aspect. When the men who cultivated the earth began to feel the need of other neighbouring lands and became conquerors, then the soldier was evolved, until in the middle ages there resulted such a triumph of militarism that the nobles alone were conquerors in war; and the persons who to-day would be called superior, the men of intellect, the poets, were considered as feeble folk, despicable and effeminate. In our own times, now that the great conquests of the earth have been made and the victorious people consequently brought into harmony, the moment has come for conquering the environment itself, in order to wring from it new bread and new wealth. And this is the proud work of human intelligence which creates by aiding all the forces of nature and by triumphing over its environment; thus to-day it is the man of intelligence who is superior. But it seems as though a new epoch were in preparation, a truly human epoch, and as though the end had almost come of those evolutionary periods which sum up the history of the heroic struggles of humanity; an epoch in which an assured peace will promote the brotherhood of man, while morality and love will take their place as the highest form of human superiority. In such an epoch there will really be superior human beings, there will really be men strong in morality and in sentiment. Perhaps in this way the reign of woman is approaching, when the enigma of her anthropological superiority will be deciphered. Woman was always the custodian of human sentiment, morality and honour, and in these respects man always has yielded woman the palm.
Face and Visage
The Limits of the Face.—The face is that part of the head which remains when the cranial cavity is not considered. To attempt to separate accurately, in the skeleton, the facial from the cerebral portion would involve a lengthy anatomical description; for our purpose it is enough to grasp the general idea that the face is the portion situated beneath the forehead, bounded in front by the curves of the eyebrows, and in profile by a line passing in projection through the auricular foramen and the external orbital apophysis (Fig. 39, page ([188])).
It is customary during life to consider the entire anterior portion of the head as constituting one single whole, bounded above by the line formed by the roots of the hair, and below by the chin. This portion includes actually not only the face but a portion of the cerebral cranium as well, namely, the forehead; it bears the name of the visage and is considered under this aspect only during life.
Human Characteristics of the Face.—One characteristic of the human cranium, as we have already seen (Fig. 40), as compared with animals, is the decrease in size of the face, and especially of the jaw-bones in inverse proportion to the increase of the cranial volume.
"Man," says Cuvier, "is of all living animals the one that has the largest cranium and the smallest face; and animals are stupider and more ferocious as they depart further from the human proportions."
In man, the cranium, assuming that graceful development which is characteristic of this superior species, surmounts the face, which recedes below the extreme frontal limit of the brain.
The different races of mankind, however, do not all of them attain so perfect a form; in some of them the face protrudes somewhat in advance of the extreme frontal limit, and in such cases we say that it is prognathous.
Thus the relations in the reciprocal development between cranium and face are different in animals and in man; as they also are in the various human races. Cuvier gives some idea of these proportions by comparing the European man with animals, by means of the following formulas which he has obtained by calculating approximately the square surface of a middle section of the head: