shake to the foundations the authority of documents which some mid-Victorian school of Christianity has hitherto held to be divinely and verbally inspired—not realising that the normal tendency of human nature is to be decorative when writing its national history or when giving its reasons for having plunged into war.
You begin now, then, to perceive (if you did not before), the importance of ornamental association, even when confined to matters of arithmetic; and the moral value to future ages not merely of calculated truths but of calculated untruths.
But this merely figurative illustration of the quickness of the human brain, in its primitive stage, to use mathematics to unmathematical ends (or science to ends quite unscientific) does not bring us very far upon the road to that self-realisation, in ornament rather than in use, which I hope to make manifest by tracing to their most characteristic forms of expression the higher grades of civilization.
And I shall hope, by and by, to show that you cannot be social without also being ornamental; it is the beginning of that connecting link which shall presently make men realise that life is one, and that all life is good.
Take, to begin with, the earliest instruments by which primitive man began raising himself from the ruck of material conditions; his
