Sec. 3. Whatever else may be thought of it, there is at least this to be said for the cult of historic homesickness to which reference has just been made: it happens to be at one with modern ethnology and history in suggesting that earlier cultures were on the whole not less content and self-satisfied in their condition than our own. It is primitive man, not the modern, who is slow to move and is satisfied, as a matter of course, with the manner of life in which he fancies his people to have lived from time immemorial. Change in early social groups is tragic when it is not insensible. It comes through conquest and enslavement by outsiders or through stress of the dread of these, or by gradual adaptation of custom to failing environmental resources or to increasing wealth. Assent to change is in general grudging or tacit at best and is commonly veiled by some more or less transparent fiction. And our suspicion of fallacy lurking somewhere in the type of retrospective Idealism we have been considering is strengthened when we come to look a little closely to details. To take a commonplace example--can it be held that the difference between using a typewriter and "writing by hand" is purely and simply a matter of degree--that the machine serves the same purpose and accomplishes the same _kind_ of result as the pen, but simply does the work more easily, rapidly, and neatly? Undoubtedly some such impression may easily be gathered from an external survey of the ways that men have used at different times for putting their ideas on record. But it ignores important aspects of the case. For one thing, the modern invention effects a saving of the writer's time which can be used in further investigation or in more careful revision or in some way wholly unrelated to literary work, and if the machine makes any part of the writer's task less irksome, or the task as a whole less engrossing, the whole matter of literary effort becomes less forbidding and its place and influence as a social or a personal function may for better or for worse be altered. The difference brought to pass transcends mere technical facility--it ramifies into a manifold of differences affecting the entire qualitative character and meaning of the literary function. And only by an arbitrary sophistication of the facts can this complexity of new outcome be thought of as implicit and dynamic in the earlier stage.