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
