That which we know of man divides clearly into two great ages of his being. The first is, as far as our view is concerned, limited on the one side by that profound fugue of planetary Destiny which we call the beginning of the Ice Age--and about which we can (within the picture of world-history) say no more than _that_ a cosmic change took place--and on the other by the beginnings of high cultures on Nile and Euphrates, with which the whole meaning of human existence became suddenly different. We discover everywhere the sharp frontier of Tertiary and Diluvial, and on the hither side of it we see man as a completely formed type, familiar with custom, myth, wit, ornament, and technique and endowed with a bodily structure that has not materially altered up to the present day.

We will consider the first age as that of the primitive Culture. The only field in which this Culture endured throughout the second age (though certainly in a very “late” form) and is found alive and fairly intact to-day is north-west Africa. It is the great merit of Leo Frobenius[37] that he recognized this quite clearly, beginning with the assumption that in this field a _whole world_ of primitive life (and not merely a greater or less number of primitive tribes) remained remote from the influences of the high Cultures. The ethnologist-psychologist, on the contrary, delights in collecting, from all over the five continents, fragments of peoples who really have nothing in common but the negative fact of living a subordinate existence in the middle of one or another of the high Cultures, without participation in its inner life. The result is a congeries of tribes, some stationary, some inferior, and some decadent, whose respective modes of expression, moreover, are indiscriminately lumped together.

But the primitive Culture is not fragmentary, but something _strong and integral_, something highly vital and effectual. Only, this Culture is so different from everything that we men of a higher Culture possess in the way of spiritual potentialities that we may question whether even those people which have carried the first age very deep into the second are good evidence, in their present modes of being and waking-being, for the condition of the old time.

For some thousands of years now the waking-consciousness of man has had the impression of constant mutual touch between the tribes and peoples as an obvious everyday fact. But in dealing with the first age we must not forget that in it man, cohering in a very few small groups, is completely lost in the immensity of the landscape, the ruling element therein being the mighty masses of the great animal-herds. The rarity of our finds sufficiently proves this. At the time of Aurignacian Man there were perhaps a dozen hordes, each a few hundred strong, wandering in the whole area of France, and such hordes must have regarded it as a deeply impressive and puzzling event when (if ever) they became aware that fellow men existed. Can we imagine even in the least degree what it was to live in a world almost empty of men--we for whom all nature has long since become a background for the human multitude? How man’s world-consciousness must have changed when, besides the forests and the herds of beasts, other men “just like himself” began to be met with, more and more frequently, in the country-side. The increase of man’s numbers--this, too, doubtless took place very suddenly--made experience of “fellow men” habitual, and replaced the impression of astonishment by the feelings of pleasure or hostility, and these again evoked a whole new world of experiences and of involuntary and inevitable relations. It was for the history of the human soul perhaps the deepest and most pregnant of all events. It was in relation to alien life-forms that man first became conscious of his own, and now the interior organization of the clan was enriched by a wealth of intertribal forms of relation, which thereafter completely dominated primitive life and thought. For it was then that, out of very simple modes of sensuous understanding, the rudiments of verbal language (and, therefore, of abstract thought) came into being, amongst them the particularly fortunate few, which--though we can form no idea of their structure--we may assume as the origins of the later Indogermanic and Semitic language-groups.

Then, out of this general primitive Culture of a humanity linked by intertribal relations, there shot up suddenly (about 3000 B.C.[38]) the Culture of Egypt and Babylonia. Probably for a millennium before that date both these fields had been nursing something that differed radically from every primitive Culture in kind and in intent, something having an inward unity common to all its forms of expression and directional in all its life. To me it seems highly probable that, if not indeed all over the earth’s surface, at any rate in man’s essence a change was accomplished at that time; and if so, then any primitive Culture worthy of the name that is still found living later, ever dwindling, in the midst of higher Cultures, should itself be something different from the Culture of the first Age. But, with reference to primitive Culture of any sort, that which I call the pre-Culture (and which can be shown to occur as a uniform process in the beginning of every high Culture) is something different in kind, something entirely new.

In all primitive existence the “it,” the Cosmic, is at work with such immediacy of force that all microcosmic utterances, whether in myth, custom, technique, or ornament, obey only the pressures of the very instant. For us, there are no ascertainable rules for the duration, tempo, and course of development of these utterances. We observe, say, an ornamental form-language--not to be called a style[39]--ruling over the population of a wide area, spreading, changing, and at last dying out. Alongside this, and perhaps with quite different fields of extension, we may find modes of fashioning and using weapons, tribal organizations, religious practices, each developing in a special way of its own, with epochal points of its own, beginnings and ends of its own, completely influenced by other form-domains. When in some prehistoric stratum we have identified an accurately known type of pottery, we cannot safely argue from it to the customs and religion of the population to which it belonged. And if by chance the same area does hold for a particular form of marriage and, say, a certain type of tattooing, this never signifies a common basic idea such as is indicated, for example, by the discovery of gunpowder and that of perspective in painting. No necessary connexions come to light between ornament and organization by age-classes, or between the cult of a god and the kind of agriculture practised. Development in these cases means always some development of one or another individual aspect or trait of the primitive Culture, never of that Culture itself. This, as I have said before, is essentially chaotic; the primitive Culture is neither an organism nor a sum of organisms.

But with the type of the higher Culture this “it” gives way to a strong and undiffused _tendency_. Within the primitive Culture tribes and clans are the only quickened beings--other than the individual men of course. _Here, however, the Culture itself is such a being._ Everything primitive is a sum--a sum of the expression-forms of primitive groupings. The high Culture, on the contrary, is the waking-being of a single huge organism which makes not only custom, myths, technique, and art, but the very peoples and classes incorporated in itself the vessels of one single form-language and one single history. The oldest speech that we know of belongs to the primitive Culture, and has lawless destinies of its own which cannot be deduced from those of, say, Ornament or Marriage. But the history of script belongs integrally with the expression-history of the several higher Cultures. That the Egyptian, Chinese, Babylonian, and Mexican each formed a special script in its pre-Cultural age--that the Indian and the Classical on the other hand did not do so, but took over (and very late) the highly developed writing of a neighbouring Civilization--that in the Arabian, again, every new religion and sect immediately formed its particular script--all these are facts that stand in a deeply intimate relation to the generic form-history of these Cultures and its inner significance.

To these two ages our knowledge of man is restricted, and they certainly do not suffice to justify conclusions of any sort about possible or certain new eras or about their “when” and “how”--quite apart from the fact that in any case the cosmic connexions that govern the history of man as a genus are entirely inaccessible to our measures.

My kind of thought and observation is limited to the physiognomy of the actual. At the point when the experience of the “judge of men” _vis-à-vis_ his environment, and that of the “man of action” _vis-à-vis_ his facts, become ineffective, there also this insight finds its limit. The existence of these two ages is a _fact of historical experience_; more, our experiencing of the primitive Culture consists not only in surveying, in its relics, a self-contained and closed-off thing, but also in reacting to its deeper meaning by virtue of an inward relation to it which persists in us. But the second age opens to us another and quite different kind of experience. It was an incident, the sense of which cannot now be scrutinized, that the type of the higher Culture appeared suddenly in the field of human history. Quite possibly, indeed, it was some sudden event in the domain of earth-history that brought forth a new and different form into phenomenal existence. But the fact that we have before us eight such Cultures, all of the same build, the same development, and the same duration, justifies us in _looking at them comparatively_, and therefore justifies our treating them as comparable, studying them comparatively, and obtaining from our study a knowledge which we can extend backwards over lost periods and forwards over the future--provided always that a Destiny of a different order does not replace this form-world, suddenly and basically, by another. Our licence to proceed thus comes from general experience of organic being. As in the history of the Raptores or the Coniferæ we cannot prophesy whether and when a new species will arise, so in that of Cultural history we cannot say whether and when a new Culture shall be. But from the moment when a new being is conceived in the womb, or a seed sinks into the earth, we do know _the inner form of this new life-course_; and we know that the quiet course of its development and fulfilment may be disturbed by the pressure of external powers, but never altered.

This experience teaches, further, that the Civilization which at this present time has gripped the earth’s whole surface is not a third age, but a stage--a necessary stage--of the Western Culture, distinguished from its analogues only by the forcefulness of its extension-tendency. Here experience ends, and all speculation on what new forms will govern the life of future mankind (or, for that matter, whether there will be any such new forms) all building of majestic card-houses on the foundation of “it should be, it shall be” is mere trifling--far too futile, it seems to me, to justify one single life of any value being expended on it.

The group of the high Cultures is not, as a group, an organic unit. That they have happened in just this number, at just these places and times, is, for the human eye, an incident without deeper intelligibility. The ordering of the individual Cultures, on the contrary, has stood out so distinctly that the historical technique of the Chinese, the Magian, and the Western worlds--often, indeed, the mere common consent of the educated in these Cultures--has been able to fashion a set of names upon which it would be impossible to improve.[40]

Historical thought, therefore, has the double task of dealing comparatively with _the individual life-courses of the Cultures_, and of examining the incidental and irregular relations of the Cultures amongst themselves in respect of their meaning. The necessity of the first of these tasks, obvious enough, has yet been overlooked hitherto. The second has been handled, but only by the lazy and shallow method of imposing causality over the whole tangle and laying it out tidily along the “course” of a hypothetical “world”-history, thereby making it impossible to discover either the psychology of these difficult, but richly suggestive, relations or to discover that of the inner life of any particular Culture. In truth, the condition for solving the first problem is that the second has been solved already. The relations are very different, even under the simple aspect of time and space. The Crusades brought a Springtime face to face with an old and ripe Civilization; in the Cretan-Mycenæan world seed-time and golden autumn are seen together. A Civilization may stream over from immense remoteness, as the Indian streamed into the Arabian from the East, or lie senile and stifling over an infancy, as the Classical lay upon its other side. But there are differences, too, of kind and strength; the Western Culture seeks out relations, the Egyptian tries to avoid them; the former is beaten by them again and again in tragic crises, while the Classical gets all it can out of them, without suffering. But all these tendencies have their roots in the spirituality of the Culture itself--and sometimes they tell us more of this Culture than does its own language, which often hides more than it communicates.