Nevertheless, the art of making iron may have originated not so much from effort as from inspiration; the process may have been less one of reasoning than one of imagination, less one of construction than one of invention. In fact, when we realize that imagination is almost wholly a pure gift (like beauty, or artistic genius or a singing voice) while the reasoning and constructive faculties require long education, we may reasonably conclude that the production of iron and of all the metals and processes in prehistoric times, was probably attributable mainly to invention.
The crowning invention of prehistoric man was that of writing; for it lifted him out of his dependence on oral teachings, with their liability to error and forgetfulness, into a condition in which the facts and experiences of life, and the reasons for failure or success, could be put into permanent form, and supply sure bases from which to start on any line of progress in the future.
The production of the art of writing seems to have been a pure invention, and it has always been so regarded. Nothing resembling writing is to be found in nature; _nowhere do we see in nature any effort to preserve any records of any kind_. How man, or a man, was led to invent writing we can only imagine, for we cannot ascertain. When we realize, however, how entirely novel an undertaking the production of writing was, and that there is no process of mere reasoning by which a man could arrive at a decision to produce it, we seem forced to conclude that it must have been caused by one of those inexplicable conceptions that imagination puts into the mind, and that constitute an inspiration, coming from the Great Outside and its ruler, the Almighty.
In fact, if one ponders the history and teachings of the Christian religion (in truth of all religions), and notes that the revelations on which they are believed to have been founded seem to have come unbidden to certain men as inspirations from On High, he must realize how similar are the conceptions that come to inventors in a field less spiritual, but yet actual. For in the case of each basic invention, an idea seems to have come unbidden to the mind, and grown and developed there.