It is the social function of writing, by giving ideas a lasting record, to make possible a more certain, continuous and diversified growth of the human mind. It does for the race very much what it does for the individual. When the student has a good thought he writes it down, so that it may be recalled at will and made the starting-point for a better thought in the same direction; and so mankind at large records and cherishes its insights. Until writing is achieved the accumulation of ideas depends upon oral tradition, the capacity of which is measured by the interest and memory of the people who transmit it. It must, therefore, confine itself chiefly to ideas and sentiments for which there is a somewhat general and constant demand, such as popular stories—like the Homeric legends—chants, proverbs, maxims and the like. It is true that tradition becomes more or less specialized in families and castes—as we see, for instance, in the widespread existence of a hereditary priesthood—but this specialization cannot be very elaborate or very secure in its continuance. There can hardly be, without writing, any science or any diversified literature. These require a means by which important ideas can be passed on unimpaired to men distant in time and space from their authors. We may safely pronounce, with Gibbon, that “without some species of writing no people has ever preserved the faithful annals of their history, ever made any considerable progress in the abstract sciences, or ever possessed, in any tolerable degree of perfection, the useful and agreeable arts of life.”[24] Nor can stable and extended government be organized without it, for such government requires a constitution of some sort, a definite and permanent body of law and custom, embracing the wisdom of the past regarding the maintenance of social order. It is quite the same with religious systems. The historical religions are based upon Scriptures, the essential part of which is the recorded teaching of the founder and his immediate disciples, and without such a record Christianity, Buddhism or Mohammedanism could never have been more than a small and transient sect. There may well have been men of religious genius among our illiterate forefathers, but it was impossible that they should found enduring systems. The whole structure and progress of modern life evidently rests upon the preservation, in writing, of the achievements of the antique mind, upon the records, especially, of Judea, Greece and Rome. To inquire what we should have been without these would be like asking what we should have been if our parents had not existed. Writing made history possible, and the man of history with his complex institutions. It enabled a rapid and secure enlargement of that human nature which had previously been confined within small and unstable groups.