With the commencement of human relations, the outlines of an absolutely new world come into view. Dim and vague at the outset, as the relations are simple and low. But as these increase in number, range, and degree, not only the outlines, but the far-reaching surface, the mountains, the rivers, the products, the sky, and the climate of a new world stand out clear, definite, and unmistakable. This new realm we name _civilization_. It is super-imposed upon the physical world, but is as distinct from it as thought from the molecules of the brain. Nature furnishes the basis, but social relations furnish the conditions of the human energy that has lifted itself into the mighty edifice we call civilization. All genera and species and families and individuals are so many forms in which the radiant energy of the sun has deposited itself. Playing with its heat and its light upon soil, sea, and sky, the sun has built the myriad organic forms we see. So all objects, interests, and laws embraced within the range of civilization are the forms in which social force, arising through relations, has deposited itself. Human language itself is an embodiment of social force. The grammars of different languages actually advertise the social status and condition of the peoples who used them. In the Chinese language we have no distinction as to parts of speech, thus showing that the national consciousness was arrested at the stage of paternalism in government. The ancient Romans put enormous stress upon the will. They formulated the laws by which men are still regulated in civilized social life. A hint of this we get in the Latin language, by the small use made of the pronoun. Ideas, too, are expressions of translated social energy. Nothing seems to be more insulated than the human brain, by the aid of which the mind does its thinking. Out of sight and out of touch, within the dark depths of its own mysterious home, it would appear to be shut up to absolute solitude. Here, at least, we would expect to find individual, independent work. But not so. No individual brain can think, only as it uses the brains of others in the process. Homer’s Iliad is a poetic formulation of what all Greece felt. The elements of myth, thought, passion, which it contains, were all in the contemporary Greek mind. In committing this poem to memory, the Greeks were but storing up their own thoughts. Hegel, in thinking out his remarkable system of philosophy, used the brains of all the men who had preceded him in the difficult work of solving the problems of existence. Darwin saw much in nature, because, through relation, he was able to look through the eyes of all naturalists.