The peoples that have taken the lead in this cultural growth, and more particularly in the technological advance, have never lived under a full grown and consistently worked out patriarchal system, nor have they, therefore, ever fully assimilated that peculiarly personal and arbitrarily authoritative scheme of anthropomorphic beliefs that commonly goes with the patriarchal system. In the earlier phases of their cultural experience, and until recently, they have lived in small communities, under more or less of local self-government, and have in great part shown some degree of religious scepticism and insubordination. They have had some experience of the sea and of that impersonal run of phenomena which the sea offers; which call on those who have to do with the sea for patient observation of how such impersonal forces work, and which constrain them to learn by trial and error how these forces may be turned to account. Latterly, in the days of their most pronounced technological advance, these peoples have had experience of an economic and industrial system organised on an unexampled scale, such as to constitute a very wide and inclusive industrial community within which intercourse has been increasingly easy and effective. These circumstances have determined the range of their habituation in its larger features; and these peoples have come under the discipline of this situation with a spiritual endowment apparently differing in some degree from what any other group of peoples has ever brought to a similar task. How much of the outcome, cultural and technological, is to be set down naïvely and directly to a peculiar temperamental bent in this human raw material would be hazardous to conjecture. Something seems fairly to be credited to that score. The particular mixture of hybrids that goes to make up these peoples, and in which the dolicho-blond enters more or less ubiquitously, appears to lack a certain degree of subtlety, such as seems native to many other peoples that have created civilisations of a different complexion,--a subtlety that shows itself in a readiness for intrigue and farsighted appreciation of the springs of human nature, and which often shows itself also in high-wrought and stupendous constructions of anthropomorphic myth and theology, religion and magic, as well as in such large and fertile systems of creative art as will commonly accompany these anthropomorphic creations. Those peoples that are infused with an appreciable blond admixture have on the other hand, not commonly excelled in the farther reaches of the spiritual life, particularly not in the refinements of a sustained and finished anthropomorphism. Their best efficiency has rather run to those bull-headed deeds of force and those mechanic arts that touch closely on the domain of the inorganic forces.