There seems to be a wide-spread opinion that the rise of the Indo-Europeans was the first dawn of day in a benighted world. Their migrations were a missionary movement on a grand scale. They dispelled darkness, ignorance, and superstitions, broke the crust of a stagnant conservatism, overthrew outworn customs, brought an entirely new culture, and revolutionized life and the world. We might call attention to the fact that Indo-European culture and life were a product of Neolithic experience, that it was the blossoming of Neolithic growth, that it represented only one part or phase of Neolithic attainment. "The best traditions make the best rebels."[179] The question remains: Was Neolithic thought and feeling destroyed by their coming, or did it still persist, like a river flowing underground, and is most of our deepest life to-day a fairly direct continuation of the older current only somewhat modified by the revolution? We notice first of all the commonness or community of Neolithic feeling and life, its almost monotonous uniformity, over Europe, eastern Asia, and probably even far wider areas. We may easily exaggerate this. The cultures of the Mediterranean basin, of Spain and France, of the Danube valley, of northern Germany and Scandinavia, not to mention smaller, more isolated provinces, showed well-marked differences. There was probably more diversity in the people of every one of these provinces, especially at centres of trade, even in every larger village, than our hasty study would lead us to suspect. But in fundamental characters there was wide-spread and marked similarity; and this, like the wide range of dominant genera and species of animals, is a sign of vitality and fitness. The Neolithic period coincides roughly with the latter part of Wundt's Totem Age: the Bronze period ushered in his Age of Heroes.?[180] During the first period the individual counted for very little, everything was tribal. In the second period the great leaders of popular migrations emerge, young, vigorous, hot-blooded. With the appearance of these "kings of men" comes the rise of nations. Tribal control wanes, and the slow development of individual, personal judgment and conscience, self-control, and responsibility replaces it to a great extent. We read in the history of Israel that the long Egyptian bondage of a stiff-necked nomad people, being broken to the rudiments of order and civilization, was followed by an exodus and a period of judges or popular leaders, when "there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes." It was a period of lawlessness and anarchy; recovery was slow and painful, and finally only partially attained by the appointment of a king. A similar education, on a vastly larger scale both of area and time, was going on all over Europe.