Prof. Burrows, in his valuable work on _The Discoveries in Crete_ (1907), somewhat confuses one of his problems by assuming that, on a given chronological view, the creators of the early Ægean civilisation were "the most progressive and artistic part of the race" (p. 193). No such assumption can be valid on any chronology. Every "part" of a race, broadly speaking, has the same total potentialities. The determinants are the special _evocative_ conditions, which may be either culture contacts or economic fostering. A rational view of the growth of Greek art is put by Dr. Mahaffy, despite his endorsement of Mr. Freeman's extravagant estimate of Athenian intelligence:--"However national and diffused it [art] became, this was due to careful study, and training, and legislation, and not to a sort of natural compulsion.... As natural beauty was always the exception among Greek men, so artistic talent was also rare and special" (_Social Life in Greece_, 3rd ed. p. 430). All the remains, as well as every principle of sociological science, go to support this view of the case. When Reber asserts (_Hist. of Ancient Art_, Eng. tr. 1883, p. 264) that "the very first carvings of Greece had a power of development which was wanting in all the other nations of that period," he is setting up an occult principle and obscuring the problem. The other nations of _that period_ were not in progressive stages; but some of them had progressed in art in their time. And many of the "very first" Greek works--that is, of the "historic" period, as distinguished from the "Minoan"--are enormously inferior to some very ancient Egyptian work. The development of taste was itself the outcome of a thousand steps of comparison and specialisation, art growing "artistic" as children grow in reasonableness and in nervous co-ordination. And the special conditions of historic Greece were roughly these:-- (1) The great primary stimulus to Greek art, science, and thought, through the contact of the early settlers in Asia Minor with the remains of the older Semitic civilisation,[321] and the further stimuli from Egypt. (2) Multitude of autonomous communities, of which the members had intercourse as kindred yet critical strangers, emulous of each other, but mixing their stocks, and so developing the potentialities of the species. (3) Multitude of religious cults, each having its local temples, its local statues, and its local ritual practices. (4) The concourse in Athens, and some other cities, of alert and capable men from all parts of the Greek-speaking world,[322] and of men of other speech who came thither to learn.