Thus song, then, was the chief agent of civilization to primitive man. All that is supplied in our lives by railroads, telegraph lines, telephones, newspapers, books, and libraries was supplied to primitive peoples by song. But this still represents only half the value of song. If it gave to primitive men all the practical service which specialized inventions are rendering to us, it also gave them the romance and beauty which we have largely lost from our lives. Every simple, primitive person, we have said, sings--either his own song or his neighbor’s. We have in great abundance the records of what their songs were about. The subjects cover nearly the whole range capable of artistic treatment, but chiefly the great human experiences--love, pity, nature, death, the supernatural. Slowly, after much imitating and experimenting, men learned to sing their feelings. This achievement was so important that there is hardly another one to be compared with it. For the growth of civilization has been simply the growth in men of consciousness--consciousness of themselves and their surroundings. And every new song that men were able to make for themselves marked a new step in consciousness. To us it seems quite obvious that a deer, for instance, has four legs. But the fact is obvious only as everything else is obvious when it is really looked at. The great difficulty is to get people to _look_ at things. And it was probably a real (and most important) discovery when the primitive huntsman realized that the deer he had been hunting had four legs, and not three or five. He simply hadn’t thought about the matter before. He hadn’t observed clearly. Now he had added one more fact about life to his mental treasure house. He had become one more degree clearly conscious. Now, art has been the chief agent of this advancing consciousness through the centuries. Our huntsman perhaps never thought about the number of the deer’s legs until he tried to draw the deer with a bone knife on the wall of his cave. But when he had to _create_ the deer in a work of art then he _had_ to come to clear consciousness about the matter. And the same is true of every song that simple people have made. It necessitated true observation. It forced its author to _see_. It may seem childishly obvious to say in a song that the bluebells are blue, but most people pay little attention to the question. It is something to have thought the fact worth mentioning. But it was much more. It was not only an increase in consciousness. It was an increase in experience. By singing over his little song about the bluebell the peasant enjoyed the bluebell a second time in his imagination. It is nothing against the song that the blueness of the bluebell is obvious. Most of the beautiful things in life are obvious but nevertheless go unrecognized. The important thing about the song is that somebody enjoyed the blueness of the bluebell so much that he had to sing about it.