1352 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



with its corresponding limitations. To explain and define this 

 Industrial Age we need an excursion into the past for its earliest 

 analogies. Amid the contemporary discoveries of non-industrial 

 character and application, and hence little valued by the industrial 

 and pecuniary culture, save as side interests at best, what have been 

 greater than those of man's history — and of his pre-history? This 

 early period, at first called the Stone Age from its surviving flints, 

 was next seen to need discrimination into two main periods, the 

 earlier and later, and each of course with its sub-periods and peoples 

 as well. The Old Stone Age, thus called the Palaeolithic, with its 

 chipped flints increasingly varied and well wrought, was thus 

 succeeded by the Neolithic Age, recognised primarily by its often 

 polished implements. But these differences were next seen to throw 

 light upon two fundamentally distinct civilisations, the earlier of 

 hunting type, the later predominantly agricultural; and with their 

 clearly different relations to organic life accordingly, the former 

 necessarily finding its success in the successful infliction of death; 

 and so expressing and idealising this in art, and even deepening to 

 beginnings of religion centred around the tomb. Whereas the later 

 civilisation centred upon the increasing promotion of life; and 

 through its long continued progress there have come down all our 

 cultivated plants, and all our domesticated animals — say, indeed, 

 the plants which have so much cultivated man's powers, the animals 

 too which have so much domesticated them. What saying of our 

 time is more hackneyed than that "war is fundamental in human 

 nature!" That this is a crude libel on feminine nature needs no 

 argument; and but a moment's thought is needed to see this 

 inherent in occupational nature, that of the hunter, who can only 

 too readil}^ come to man-hunting, and who thence develops war, 

 by mobilising, impressing the other occupations into his service, 

 and this increasingly, as the history of war so much shows, and now 

 its menacing future, since wellnigh completion to perfection of 

 destructiveness. 



In summary, then, the pre-historic past shows clearly two con- 

 trasted civilisations, the Palaeotechnic and the Neotechnic, the hunt- 

 ing and the agricultural, and the significance of this contrast is its 

 obvious and clarifying application to our Industrial and Technic 

 Age, as also presenting two periods, which its economists should 

 long ago have distinguished, and as essentially Palaeotechnic and 

 Neotechnic. The former is still the dominant one, since charac- 

 terised by the reckless and wasteful exploitation of natural resources, 

 whether mineral and organic, towards mechanistic industries; and 

 maintaining and increasing population for its service, and thus 

 irrespective of their evolutionary life-interests; and all this essen- 

 tially in terms and tokens of the corresponding pecuniary culture, 

 as its dominant technique and even obsession. The latter phase of 



