Self-feeling, self-assertion and the general relation of the individual to the group are much the same at all epochs, and there was never a time since man became human when, as we sometimes read, “personality emerged.” Change has taken place chiefly in the extent and character of the group to which the individual appeals, and in the ways in which he tries to distinguish himself. The Germanic tribesman, the mediæval knight, the Renaissance artist or scholar and the modern captain of industry are alike ambitious: it is the object that differs. There has, indeed, been a development of personality in history, but it has been correlative with that of the general life, and has brought no essential change in the relation between the two. In tribal life, then, since the conditions did not admit of wider unification, public consciousness could be only local in scope. Beyond its narrow range the cords which held life together were of a subconscious character—heredity, of course, with its freight of mental and social tendency; oral tradition, often vague and devious, and a mass of custom that was revered without being understood. These wider relations, not being surveyed and discussed, could not be the objects of deliberate thought and will, but were accepted as part of the necessary order of things, and usually ascribed to some divine source. In this way language, laws, religion, forms of government, social classes, traditional relations to other clans or tribes—all of which we know to have been built up by the cumulative workings of the human mind—were thought of as beyond the sphere of man’s control. The wider unity existed, then as now; human development was continuous in time and, after a blind fashion, coöperative among contemporaries. The tools of life were progressively invented and spread by imitation from tribe to tribe, the fittest always tending to survive; but only the immediate details of such changes were matters of consciousness: as processes they were beyond human cognizance. A man might adapt an ancient custom to a fresh emergency, but he would be unaware that he was shaping the growth of institutions. There was even a tribal or national opinion, of a slow, subconscious sort; a growth and consensus of ideas upon matters of general and enduring interest, such as religion, marriage and government. And, under unusual pressure, some more conscious unity of spirit might be aroused, as among the Germans or Gauls confederated against Rome; but this was likely to be transient.