It is still common, among men who professedly accept the theory of evolution, to speak of special culture developments, notably those of sculpture and literature in Greece, art in medieval Italy, and theocratic religion in Judea, as mysteries beyond solution. It may be well, then, to consider some of these developments as processes of social causation, in terms of the general principles above outlined. [A rational view was reached by the sociologists of the eighteenth century, by whom the question of culture beginnings was much discussed--_e.g._, Goguet's _De l'origine des lois, des arts, et des sciences_, 1758; Ferguson's _Essay on the History of Civil Society_, 1767; and Hume's essay on the _Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences_. At the end of the century we find the solution scientifically put by Walckenaer: "Ainsi le germe de génie et des talens existe dans tous les tems, mais tous les tems ne sont pas propres à le faire éclore" (_Essai sur l'histoire de l'espèce humaine_, 1798, 1. vi, ch. xx, _Des siècles les plus favorables aux productions de génie_, pp. 348, 349). In England forty years later we find Hallam thus exemplifying the obscurantist reaction: "There is only one cause for the want of great men in any period--nature does not think fit to produce them. They are no creatures of education and circumstances" (_Literature of Europe_, pt. i, ch. iii, § 35). A kindred though much less crude view underlies Sir Francis Galton's argument in _Hereditary Genius_. Cp. the present writer's paper on "The Economics of Genius," in _The Forum_, April, 1898 (rep. in _Essays in Sociology_, vol. ii), and the able essay of Mr. Cooley, there cited. My esteemed friend, Mr. Lester Ward (_Dynamic Sociology_, ii, 600, 601), seems to me, as does Mill (_System of Logic_, bk. vi, ch. iv, § 4; cp. Bain, _J.S. Mill_, p. 146), to err somewhat on the opposite side to that of Hallam and Galton, in assuming that faculty is nearly equal in all, given only opportunity.] And first as to Greece. As against the common conception of the Hellenic people as "innately" artistic, it may be well to cite the judgment of an artist who, if not more scientific in his method of reaching his opinion, has on the whole a better right to it in this case than has the average man to his. It is a man of genius who writes[319]: "A favourite faith, dear to those who teach, is that certain periods were especially artistic, and that nations, readily named, were notably lovers of art. So we are told that the Greeks were, as a people, worshippers of the beautiful, and that in the fifteenth century art was ingrained in the multitude....Listen! There never was an artistic period. There never was an Art-loving nation." This, which was sometime a paradox, is when interpreted one of the primary truths of sociology.