omary that had been
gathering since ever the first flint was chipped or the first fire built
together. From the day when man contrived himself a tool and suffered
another male to draw near him, he ceased to be altogether a thing of
instinct and untroubled convictions. From that day forth a widening
breach can be traced between his egotistical passions and the social
need. Slowly he adapted himself to the life of the homestead, and his
passionate impulses widened out to the demands of the clan and the
tribe. But widen though his impulses might, the latent hunter and
wanderer and wonderer in his imagination outstripped their development.
He was never quite subdued to the soil nor quite tamed to the home.
Everywhere it needed teaching and the priest to keep him within the
bounds of the plough-life and the beast-tending. Slowly a vast system
of traditional imperatives superposed itself upon his instincts,
imperatives that were admirably fitted to make him that cultivator, that
cattle-mincer, who was for twice ten thousand years the normal man.

And, unpremeditated, undesired, out of the accumulations of his tilling
came civilisation. Civilisation was the agricultural surplus. It
appeared as trade and tracks and roads, it pushed boats out upon the
rivers and presently invaded the seas, and within its primitive courts,
within temples grown rich and leisurely and amidst the gathering medley
of the seaport towns rose speculation and philosophy and science, and
the beginning of the new order that has at last established itself
as human life. Slowly at first, as we traced it, and then with an
accumulating velocity, the new powers were fabricated. Man as a whole
did not seek them nor desire them; they were thrust into his hand. For
a time men took up and used these new things and the new powers
inadvertently as they came to him, recking nothing of the consequences.
For endless generations change led him very gently. But when he had
been led far enough, change quickened the pace. It was with a series of
shocks that he realised at last that he was living the old life less and
less and a new life more and more.

Already before the release of atomic energy the tensions between the old
way of living and the new were intense. They were far intenser than they
had been even at the collapse of the Roman imperial system. On the one
hand was the ancient life of the family and the small community and
the petty industry, on the other was a ne