In the earliest stages of art, men would of necessity be led to the adoption of such varieties by the constantly differing forms of the materials in which they worked. The uncertain fractures of flint, the various curves of the trees out of which they constructed their clubs, and the different forms of bones, would lead them imperceptibly towards the adoption of fresh tools. Occasionally some form would be hit upon, which in the hands of its employer would be found more convenient for use, and which, by giving the possessor of it some advantage over his neighbours, would commend itself to general adoption. Thus by a process, resembling what Mr. Darwin, in his late work, has termed ‘unconscious selection’, rather than by premeditation or design, men would be led on to improvement. By degrees some forms would be found best adapted to one pursuit, and some to another; one would be used for grubbing up roots, another for breaking shells, another for breaking heads; modes of procedure, accidentally hit upon in one class of occupation, would suggest improvements in another, and thus analogy, coming to the aid of accidental variation, would give an impulse to progress. Thus would commence that ramification of the arts, occupations, and sciences which, developing simultaneously and assisting each other, has borne fruit in the civilization of our own times.
I am aware that it will be found extremely difficult to realize a condition of human existence so low as that which I am supposing, and that many persons will deny the possibility of mankind having ever existed in a condition so helpless as to have been incapable of designing the simple weapons which we find in the hands of savages at the present day. It is as difficult to place one’s self in the position of a being infinitely one’s inferior, as of a being greatly one’s superior in intellect. ‘Few persons,’ says Professor Max Müller, ‘understand children, still fewer antiquity.’ Our own experience cannot save us in estimating the powers of either, for, long before the period of which we have the earliest recollection, we had ourselves undergone a course of unconscious education in the arts of a civilized community; our very first utterances were in a language which was in itself the complex growth of ages, and the improvement of our natural faculties, resulting from the continued cultivation of our race, enhances the difficulty we find in appreciating the condition of our first parents.