ral fruits of an
activity whose basis is common thought and its ultimate purpose the
common good.

It has been said with truth that it is easier to trace the growth of
science as a joint product of co-operating minds, than to find a growth
of common sentiments among the men and the nations who have created it.
True among individuals, it must be at least as true among groups and
nations. We may work successfully with some one at a problem or learn
from a teacher or a companion when we dislike him personally and do not
seek his society apart from the needs of our common work. It has often
happened, and will happen again in private and public. But though
particular antipathies may increase, the tendency to dislike others is a
diminishing quality among civilized men. In the long run common sense
and necessity will prevail. We are born to live a while before we die;
and we must live on the same planet, sometimes next door to those who
have sworn a never-dying hate.

II

UNITY IN PREHISTORIC TIMES[1]

The new perspective, with all its shift of values, which is forced on us
by the war, touches the past no less than the present and the future.
However objectively we try to present to ourselves the data of history,
we cannot emancipate ourselves from the need to present them from a
point of view which must in the last resort be our own. We may bring
ourselves by training and criticism nearer to the centre of things, more
intimate with essential factors and remote from the trivial periphery;
but it is a matter of degree, and historical study an affair after all
of mental triangulation. Like a surveyor in the field, we are safest in
our determination of any third position if we have already knowledge of
two, and of how the third looks from both of them. And even if we were
indeed at the centre of things, I suppose we might take our round of
angles quite uselessly, unless we had also some divine gift of judging
distances.

So the historian accepts his limitations as the rules of the game,
and sets out to see unity askance. It is his rare chance, if events
shift _him_, and set him gazing at a world in which, as now, half
his own career is inside the picture; not perhaps very easy to
find in a moment--as one might fail to recognize oneself in a
group-photograph--but none the less there, and intelligible only in
relation to its actual surroundings.

Looking back, indeed, over the course of anthropology and prehistoric