PREHISTORIC ART. 353 



religion for, so far as can be understood, lie had no religion, nor did 

 he make these things for the sake of power or wealth. It does not 

 appear that he considered himself in any way better off by having 

 these objects decorated than he would if they had been plain. There 

 are many hundreds of them which are entirely plain, of equal value 

 for service, evidently utilitarian, without ornament or decoration, and 

 apparently serving as weapons of the chase or war equally well with 

 those highly decorated. Therefore these objects, beautifully designed 

 as they may have been, were no addition to his wealth or his power, and 

 as for information he was not busying himself about that. He gained 

 information, it is Lrue, by experience and his own effort, as he and 

 every other human being did and will, but this wrought his own edu- 

 cation and was not for the purpose of educating those around him. So 

 this branch of the story ends where it began; he made these things 

 because they were pleasing to him, and he (each man) decided for him- 

 self what was pleasing. These works of art were the material expres- 

 sion of the delight of their maker. The man of the Paleolithic period, 

 savage though he was, had his ideal. The existence of these art works, 

 the representation of the animals which he saw, of the plants and 

 flowers which he must have recognized as beautiful, the existence of 

 these in the caverns which he inhabited, and part of the possessions 

 fabricated by him; their mere existence proves the fact of his ideality, 

 proves that he had a taste and a desire, and are evidence of his grati- 

 fication tliereof. "What other ideals he may have had we do not know; 

 he has left no manifestation thereof. So far as we know man his tastes 

 are continually changing, but whether the man of the Paleolithic period 

 changed his tastes or not is not now determinable except so far as 

 shown by his works, first of flint and then of bone, and finally of 

 engraving ?ind sculpture. It is only by these that we may know what 

 were his tastes and what their changes. 



Man does whatever art work he desires. The outcome of his work 

 is an expression of his ideal of beauty, of happiness, of goodness, of 

 justice, and what not. When his taste or desire changes, his ideal 

 changes, and with it his work. Everything that man does is done 

 because he wants it to be done; it is his ideal. Human life is only a 

 succession of ideals. The fashion in dress of the present day, why 

 does it change? Why is the ideal of one season discarded the next! 

 A change of taste is the only explanation. What produces this 

 change? "Aye, there's the rub." Taste may be produced and maybe 

 changed by study and contemplation. Man is an imitative creature; 

 he is gregarious; he loves to herd with his kind, to follow a leader, to 

 be relieved from the necessity of study or contem])lation of the needs 

 of his life; he prefers to follow in the footsteps of his forefathers and 

 the rut or route of civilization and culture which they have marked 

 out for him. It is only occasionally, once in a generation, that some 

 one being with a more energetic or ambitious desire or a greater 

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