The Evolution of the Mental Capacity Is Not Yet Completed or Stabilized :

When we view the evolutionary status of the mentality in humanity, we can identify the three stages or levels which Sri Aurobindo has described. The first is what he calls the “material mind” and this essentially brings a basically rudimentary form of mental process to the established basis of the vitality and the body. This mind is able to view, handle, manipulate, process and work on the organization of the outer life and is itself a quite considerable advance upon the much more limited mental expression found in the general animal kingdom.

The second stage is the development of the true intellectual capability of the mind, abstracted from focus or addressing the basic physical-vital life directly. The arts, philosophy, science and higher forms of religious abstraction are expressions of this second stage. This stage is not yet fully and completely integrated into human life, as seen both by its lack of full expression generally in all human beings and by the lack of an integrated, balanced and harmonized interaction between this mind and the vital-physical life. “Certainly, the mental life is not a finished evolution of Nature; it is not yet firmly founded in the human animal. The sign is that the fine and full equilibrium of vitality and matter, the sane, robust, long-lived human body is ordinarily found only in races or classes of men who reject the effort of thought, its disturbances, its tensions, or think only with the material mind. Civilised man has yet to establish an equilibrium between the fully active mind and the body; he does not yet normally possess it. Indeed, the increasing effort towards a more intense mental life seems to create, frequently, an increasing disequilibrium of the human elements, so that it is possible for eminent scientists to describe genius as a form of insanity, a result of degeneration, a pathological morbidity of Nature.”

As the process continues, eventually a balance between the intellectual capacity and the vital-physical being will established and we will be able to recognize that this capacity is then both fully integrated and widespread throughout the mass of humanity.

Sri Aurobindo goes further to point out that even while the general evolutionary development of the full abstract mental capacity has not yet been completed, Nature still pushes forward, in individual cases, to attempt to manifest the third stage or at least prepare for its appearance, creating thereby individuals who represent the first attempts at a mental development beyond the normal human capacity as we know it. “Genius is one attempt of the universal Energy to so quicken and intensify our intellectual powers that they shall be prepared for those more puissant, direct and rapid faculties which constitute the play of the supra-intellectual or divine mind.”

Sri Aurobindo