But are they of any use in those periods of advanced civilisation which they have themselves contributed to form? When Man has replaced flint knives and clubs and slings by the elaborate weapons we know, can he be content with methods of social preservation which date from the time of flint knives and clubs and slings? The efficacy of those restraints depends on a sensibility which could only exist when men scarcely distinguished imaginations from perceptions. Thence arose the credulity on which religions and moralities flourished. But now the Images have grown pale in human sensibility, just as they have in words, which are but effaced images. We need a deeper reality to take the place of these early beliefs which the growth of intelligence necessarily shows to be illusory. We must seek in the human ego an instinct in which is manifested a truly autonomous play of the power of imagination, an instinct which by virtue of its own proper development may restrain the excesses of the possessive instinct and dissipate the perils which threaten civilisation. The æsthetic instinct alone answers to that double demand. At this point we may pause to refer to the interesting analogy between this argument of Jules de Gaultier and another recently proposed solution of the problems of civilisation presented by Bertrand Russell, to which there has already been occasion to refer. The two views were clearly suggested by the same events, though apparently in complete independence, and it is interesting to observe the considerable degree of harmony which unites two such distinguished thinkers in different lands, and with unlike philosophic standpoints as regards ultimate realities.[146] Man’s impulses, as we know, Bertrand Russell holds to be of two kinds: those that are possessive and those that are creative; the typical possessive impulse being that of property and the typical creative impulse that of the artist. It is in following the creative impulse, he believes, that man’s path of salvation lies, for the possessive impulses necessarily lead to conflict while the creative impulses are essentially harmonious. Bertrand Russell seeks the unification of life. But consistency of action should, he holds, spring from consistency of impulse rather than from the control of impulse by will. Like Gaultier, he believes in what has been called, perhaps not happily, “the law of irony”; that is to say, that the mark we hit is never the mark we aimed at, so that, in all supreme success in life, as Goethe said of Wilhelm Meister, we are like Saul, the son of Kish, who went forth to seek his father’s asses and found a kingdom. “Those who best promote life,” Russell prefers to put it, “do not have life for their purpose. They aim rather at what seems like a gradual incarnation, a bringing into our human existence of something eternal.” And, again like Gaultier, he invokes Spinoza and what in his phraseology he called