But it cannot be contended that primitive human nature furnishes not only the impulse to expression but also the medium. The artist in man had the feeling; he had to discover a way to exteriorise it. Nearest perhaps to primitive art lie the immediate manifestations by regulated gesture and regulated sounds of the voice, which are also in their highest development the most potent means for transmitting an emotion. Yet the different utilities of life offered also other means—as it were, words of a language—in which the feeling could express itself and transmit itself from mind to mind. The man who used drawing as a means of communicating thoughts could express in a drawing the terror which a beast inspired or the delight he had derived from watching its movements. And just as the purpose of imparting information—whether by word or image—afforded a natural medium through which the art-impulse could work to its own ends, so also the purpose of propitiation afforded in dance or decoration something which might be diverted from its original object and be used with the single intention of expressing, for instance, the dancer’s mood. Similarly each of the other purposes that have been discussed or alluded to afforded, as it were, a concrete material for art—a shape in which the primitive impulse to gesture could embody and develop itself. And beyond the fact that art has been obliged to avail itself of media which have originally been called into existence by utilitarian, non-æsthetic needs, there lies another fact. To these external “origins” we can also trace some of the most important qualities which we appreciate in a work of art. In this way it is open to us to explain how several of the virtues of art, as we know it, may be derived from the primitive needs which it subserved; how, for instance, the lucidity of art may find its explanation in art’s use for conveying information; how the sensuous and attractive qualities of all art may be traced to the need for propitiating favour; how the power that resides in art to brace and stimulate the mind may be transmitted from the days when the artist was appointed to nerve his fellows for work or war. And, lastly, it might be argued that a most characteristic quality of art, the imagination, which is in a sense faith in the reality of the unreal (whether native to the human mind or not), may have been immensely heightened by the use of art for purposes of magic, which fuses the visible and the invisible.