232 CULTURE 



On fragments of horn and stone we have sketches 

 of reindeer and galloping horses which have been 

 disinterred from the beds of the interglacial 

 period, and carry us back across a period of, per- 

 haps, two thousand generations. They are roughly 

 scratched, but, in fidelity to life and in the ex- 

 pression of movement, they far surpass the artistic 

 efforts of early mediaeval Europe, and are indeed 

 superior to much that was produced by the 

 talents of Egypt, Assyria, India, and China. But 

 by war, pestilence, or natural catastrophes, the 

 culture that flowered in them was altogether 

 blotted out. Even the literature of such modern 

 nations as the Greeks and Romans has required to 

 be reconstructed from fragments which have been 

 recovered from the debris of barbarian conquests. 

 But, so numerous are the books in which our 

 knowledge and ideas are now recorded, that it 

 is inconceivable that they should pass away. 



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Reason, we have seen in Chapter V, consists in 

 the linking of results with causes in the inferring 

 of happenings from other happenings assisted 

 by an appreciation of the properties of things of 

 missibility as the property of a stone, of lightness, 

 invisibility, and elasticity as the properties of air. 

 An urgent practical problem of life is to discover 

 the causes of success or failure, why an arrow at 

 one time hits, at another time misses, why crops 

 may either grow or wither. We have learnt to 

 attribute misfortunes to our own mistakes, or to 

 unlucky accident. But there are hosts of illus- 

 trations to show us that these explanations are 

 not satisfactory to untrained reason. Many days 

 have not passed since misadventures which we 

 should in these times attribute to ill-luck were 

 regarded as manifestations of Divine interference. 



