2i6 DEVELOPMENT AND PURPOSE CHAP. 



These attributes are, in fact, irreconcilable, but the upshot 

 of a dispassionate criticism of experience is that, though 

 Spirit is not the whole of things nor their unconditioned 

 creator, it is a dynamic force in things, and a force which 

 progressively enlarges its borders. From being the eternal 

 and immutable basis of order, the spiritual becomes the 

 moving impulse towards that highest order, which may be 

 called the harmony of life, and the evolution of humanity 

 is the revelation of certain phases of its growth. 



4. With the advance of ethico-religious ideas the de- 

 velopment of the imaginative representation of life is closely 

 linked. For in the deeper and more subtle issues of life 

 abstract thought never satisfies, and we approach the con- 

 crete truth by flashes of insight, by emotional suggestion, 

 by constructions embodying meanings which it is hard to 

 state in explicit terms. Imagination, like all thought, is in 

 part an expression of experience, in part a construction for 

 which experience supplies material and suggestions. Hence 

 its work at any stage reflects the extent to which and the 

 methods by which at that stage experience is held together, 

 and corresponds accordingly to the movement of thought 

 in general. Thus the lowest grades of art reflect the 

 incoherence of ideas. Its stories, generally centred in 

 some magical or animistic ceremonial which they c explain,' 

 are rambling and disconnected. Its attempts at the figure 

 are childish. 1 Conversely, the clear-cut concrete ideas of 



1 1 speak of the lowest grade of art, not of an art uniformly formed 

 among the lowest grade of men. In general culture the Bushmen rank 

 almost at the bottom of existing or newly extinct peoples. Judged by 

 their implements, the men of the Upper Palaeolithic period rank clearly 

 below the Neolithic. Yet the Bushmen could draw and paint in a life- 

 like fashion of which races standing far higher are incapable, while some 

 of the animal drawings and carvings of * Aurignacian ' and 'Magdalenian ' 

 man have a force and spirit which puts them not only far above any 

 Neolithic achievement, but in the judgment of many above the corre- 

 sponding achievements of early Oriental art, and even, according to some 

 enthusiasts, on a level with those of the Greeks. It must be admitted 

 that, though some simple scenes can be made out, most of the ' Aurigna- 

 cian * drawings are as wholes of very confused and incoherent character, 

 different figures, however life-like in themselves, being thrown, as it were, 

 pell-mell on to the rock, and that the ' Magdalenian ' work is only one 



