one’s harp.” But in regarding the creative impulses as the essential part of life, and as typically manifested in the form of art, Bertrand Russell is clearly in the great line of movement with which we have been throughout concerned. We must only at the same time—as we shall see later—remember that the distinction between the “creative” and the “possessive” impulses, although convenient, is superficial. In creation we have not really put aside the possessive instinct, we may even have intensified it. For it has been reasonably argued that it is precisely the deep urgency of the impulse to possess which stirs the creative artist. He creates because that is the best way, or the only way, of gratifying his passionate desire to possess. Two men desire to possess a woman, and one seizes her, the other writes a “Vita Nuova” about her; they have both gratified the instinct of possession, and the second, it may be, most satisfyingly and most lastingly. So that—apart from the impossibility, and even the undesirability, of dispensing with the possessive instinct—it may be well to recognise that the real question is one of values in possession. We must needs lay up treasure; but the fine artist in living, so far as may be, lays up his treasure in Heaven. In recent time some alert thinkers have been moved to attempt to measure the art of civilisation by less impossibly exact methods than of old, by the standard of art, and even of fine art. In a remarkable book on “The Revelations of Civilisation”—published about three years before the outbreak of that Great War which some have supposed to date a revolutionary point in civilisation—Dr. W. M. Flinders Petrie, who has expert knowledge of the Egyptian civilisation which was second to none in its importance for mankind, has set forth a statement of the cycles to which all civilisations are subject. Civilisation, he points out, is essentially an intermittent phenomenon. We have to compare the various periods of civilisation and observe what they have in common in order to find the general type. “It should be examined like any other action of Nature; its recurrences should be studied, and all the principles which underlie its variations should be defined.” Sculpture, he believes, may be taken as a criterion, not because it is the most important, but because it is the most convenient and easily available, test. We may say with the old Etruscans that every race has its Great Year—it sprouts, flourishes, decays, and dies. The simile, Petrie adds, is the more precise because there are always irregular fluctuations of the seasonal weather. There have been eight periods of civilisation, he reckons, in calculable human history. We are now near the end of the eighth, which reached its climax about the year 1800; since then there have been merely archaistic revivals, the value of which may be variously interpreted. He scarcely thinks we can expect another period of civilisation to arise for several centuries at least.