262 CRITIQUES AND ADDRESSES. [x. 



eternity and infinity ; the capacity for intense artistic 

 feelings of pleasure in form, colour, and composition ; 

 and for those abstract notions of form and number which 

 render geometry and arithmetic possible/' " How," he 

 asks, "were all or any of these faculties first developed, 

 when they could have been of no possible use to man in 

 his early stages of barbarism \ " 



Surely the answer is not far to seek. The lowest 

 savages are as devoid of any such conceptions as the 

 brutes themselves. What sort of conceptions of space 

 and time, of form and number, can be possessed by a 

 savage who has not got so far as to be able to count 

 beyond five or six, who does not know how to draw a 

 triangle or a circle, and has not the remotest notion of 

 separating the particular quality we call form, from the 

 other qualities of bodies 1 None of these capacities are 

 exhibited by men, unless they form part of a tolerably 

 advanced society. And, in such a society, there are 

 abundant conditions by which a selective influence is 

 exerted in favour of those persons who exhibit an 

 approximation towards the possession of these capacities. 



The savage who can amuse his fellows by telling a 

 good story over the nightly fire, is held by them in 

 esteem and rewarded, in one way or another, for so 

 doing in other words, it is an advantage to him to 

 possess this power. He who can carve a paddle, or the 

 figure-head of a canoe better, similarly profits beyond his 

 duller neighbour. He who counts a little better than 

 others, gets most yams when barter is going on, and 

 forms the shrewdest estimate of the numbers of an 

 opposing tribe. The experience of daily life shows that 

 the conditions of our present social existence exercise 

 the most extraordinarily powerful selective influence in 

 favour of novelists, artists, and strong intellects of all 

 kinds ; and it seems unquestionable that all forms of 



