This Canto deals with the slow and painful emergence of life involved in matter.
At the Feet of The Mother
Canto IV: The Kingdoms of the Little Life
The first stir of mind is used by life for its own purposes. Later the mind will free itself and life also grow to look beyond our animal birth and present state of ignorance tied to the outward and the immediate.
This is the brief ephemeral existence of a dwarf humanity, a primitive life that lives only by and for the sake of flesh, not seeking for the soul within.
The mind is a limited and limiting Intelligence. It can see things only in firm and fixed boundaries and distinct and separate from each other. This is the first step in the unfolding of various aspects and powers and possibilities of the mind.
Step by step Sri Aurobindo is leading us through the evolutionary process, first of life in matter than of mind in life.
We find here a most remarkable description of the early birth of mind in the animal kind. This description is not only consistent with the deeper spiritual truths but also with the current biological understanding of the evolution of life upon earth.
We see a slow progression in the animal world, creation moving slowly through millenniums for one small step. It is a crude start and yet one that prepares for the next evolutionary step.
What follows is a remarkable passage that reveals an early prototype of primitive humanity that yet may linger in us, raw and unregenerate. It is a humanity driven by the herd instinct. Tribe and clan is all they know and the bodily self is for them only true reality.
In early humanity, the soul was just a little spark buried deep within dense rings of Matter. Such a humanity was more like the titans whose memory is preserved through myths and legends. These intermediary species paved the way for the coming of modern man that is a little farther than an animal even though its body is still of an animal make.