But with the type of the higher Culture this “it” gives way to a strong and undiffused _tendency_. Within the primitive Culture tribes and clans are the only quickened beings--other than the individual men of course. _Here, however, the Culture itself is such a being._ Everything primitive is a sum--a sum of the expression-forms of primitive groupings. The high Culture, on the contrary, is the waking-being of a single huge organism which makes not only custom, myths, technique, and art, but the very peoples and classes incorporated in itself the vessels of one single form-language and one single history. The oldest speech that we know of belongs to the primitive Culture, and has lawless destinies of its own which cannot be deduced from those of, say, Ornament or Marriage. But the history of script belongs integrally with the expression-history of the several higher Cultures. That the Egyptian, Chinese, Babylonian, and Mexican each formed a special script in its pre-Cultural age--that the Indian and the Classical on the other hand did not do so, but took over (and very late) the highly developed writing of a neighbouring Civilization--that in the Arabian, again, every new religion and sect immediately formed its particular script--all these are facts that stand in a deeply intimate relation to the generic form-history of these Cultures and its inner significance. To these two ages our knowledge of man is restricted, and they certainly do not suffice to justify conclusions of any sort about possible or certain new eras or about their “when” and “how”--quite apart from the fact that in any case the cosmic connexions that govern the history of man as a genus are entirely inaccessible to our measures.