But we know more. Our school-boys know more
than Aristotle. We stand upon Greek shoulders. This is traditional
progress--something outside the germ-plasm; a thing dependent upon our
great human faculty of speech.
That, surely, is why the word infantine was rightly used in our first
paragraph. For we may ask why, if man be millions of years old, any
record of progress should be a matter of only a few thousand
years--perhaps not more than fifteen or twenty. The answer, I believe,
is that traditional progress depends upon the possibility of tradition.
Now speech, apart from writing, involves the possibility of tradition
from generation to generation, and I am very sure that "Man before
speech" is a myth; the more we learn of the anthropoid apes the surer we
may be of that. But, after all, the possibilities of progress dependent
upon aural memory are sadly limited; not only because it is easy to
forget, but because it is also conspicuously easy to distort, as a
familiar round-game testifies. The greatest of all the epochs in human
history was that which saw the genesis of written speech. I believe that
hundreds of thousands, nay millions, of preceding years were
substantially sterile just because the educational acquirements of
individuals could be transmitted to their children neither in the
germ-plasm (for we know such transmission to be impossible), nor outside
the germ-plasm, by means of writing.
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