Here we had lighted on a crucial instance of
the march of cultural progress. The very piles testified to it, those of
the older settlement being ill-assorted and slight, whereas the later
structure was regularly built and heavily timbered. It was clear, too,
that the first set of inhabitants had lived narrow lives. All their
worldly goods were derived from strictly local sources. On the other
hand, their successors wore shells from the Mediterranean and amber
beads from the Baltic among their numerous decorations; while for their
flint they actually went as far afield as Grand Pressigny in
West-Central France, the mines of which provided the butter-like nodules
that represented the _ne plus ultra_ of Neolithic luxury. Commerce must
have been decidedly flourishing in those days. No longer was it a case
of the so-called 'silent trade', which the furtive savage prosecutes
with fear and trembling, placing, let us say, a lump of venison on a
rock in the stream dividing his haunts from those of his dangerous
neighbours, and stealing back later on to see if the red ochre for which
he pines has been deposited in return on the primitive counter. The
Neolithic trader, on the other side, must have pushed the science of
barter to the uttermost limits short of the invention of a circulating
medium, if indeed some crude form of currency was not already in vogue.

When we turn to the Dolmen-builders, and contemplate their hoary
sanctuaries, we are back among the problems raised by the philosophic
conception of progress as an advance in soul-power. Is any religion
better than none? Does it make for soul-power to be preoccupied with the
cult of the dead? Does the imagination, which in alliance with the
scientific reason achieves such conquests over nature, give way at times
to morbid aberration, causing the chill and foggy loom of an after-life
to obscure the honest face of the day? I can only say for myself that
the deepening of the human consciousnesses due to the effort to close
with the mystery of evil and death, and to extort therefrom a message of
hope and comfort, seems to me to have been worth the achievement at
almost any cost of crimes and follies perpetrated by the way. I do not
think that progress in religion is progress towards its ultimate
abolition. Rather, religion, if regarded in the light of its earlier
history, must be treated as the parent source of all the more spiritual
activities of man; and on these his material