very wide range of
experiences had enabled man to evolve a complex body politic, based on a
fairly secure social basis, and his brain had correspondingly developed
into a relatively efficient and stable organ of thought. But as yet he
had devised no means of communicating freely with other people at a
distance except through the medium of verbal messages; nor had he any
method by which he could transmit his experiences to posterity more
securely than by fugitive and fallible oral traditions. A vague
symbolization of his achievements was preserved from generation to
generation in myth-tale and epic, but he knew not how to make permanent
record of his history. Until he could devise a means to make such
record, he must remain, in the estimate of his descendants, a barbarian,
though he might be admitted to have become a highly organized and even
in a broad sense a cultured being.

Writing.

At length, however, this last barrier was broken. Some race or races
devised a method of symbolizing events and ultimately of making even
abstruse ideas tangible by means of graphic signs. In other words, a
system of writing was developed. Man thus achieved a virtual conquest
over time as he had earlier conquered space. He could now transmit the
record of his deeds and his thoughts to remote posterity. Thus he stood
at the portals of what later generations would term secure history. He
had graduated out of barbarism, and become in the narrower sense of the
word a civilized being. Henceforth, his knowledge, his poetical
dreamings, his moral aspirations might be recorded in such form as to be
read not merely by his contemporaries but by successive generations of
remote posterity. The inspiring character of such a message is obvious.
The validity of making this great culminating intellectual achievement
the test of "civilized" existence need not be denied. But we should ill
comprehend the character of the message which the earlier generations of
civilized beings transmit to us from the period which we term the
"dawning of history" did we not bear constantly in mind the long series
of progressive stages of "savagery" and "barbarism" that of necessity
preceded the final stage of "civilization" proper. The achievements of
those earlier stages afforded the secure foundation for the progress of
the future. A multitude of minor arts, in addition to the important ones
just outlined, had been developed; and for a long time civilized man was
t