It may be thought, however, that in referring to the educative effects of the work of art we need not desert the domain of a strictly æsthetic and psychological inquiry. There is nothing improbable in the supposition that the products of an activity of themselves influence this activity, so as to bring about gradually a thorough change of its character. From the expressional impulse, which in the lower stages of culture gives rise to crude and simple manifestations, there might thus be derived, by the retroactive effects of these manifestations themselves, an increasingly refined form of expression. But such a sequence of tendency, however clear and consistent it may appear at the outset, cannot possibly be thought of as unsupported by outside influences. The more we examine it, the more we shall find that the series of causes is insufficient to explain the series of effects. This view, to which we are necessarily led by investigating any period of art-history, forces itself upon us with particular cogency when we turn our attention to the earliest stages of art-development. Before the first work of art had been created, the art-impulse as well as the art-sense must necessarily have been in a very undeveloped state. The æsthetic cravings cannot possibly have gained any consciousness of their purposes ere they had realised themselves in some objective works. Of these objective works, on the other hand, it is only the simplest forms that can be derived solely from the pure art-impulse. We may consider a lyrical dance, or even a lyrical song, as direct outbursts of an emotional pressure, which, if unrelieved, would prove dangerous to the system. But we can scarcely imagine that any human being should be able to invent, say, a fully formed drama simply in order to convey in the most efficacious manner the feeling by which he is dominated. And it is yet more difficult to understand how the craving after social expression could have created, merely for its own satisfaction, such highly developed art-forms as painting and sculpture. While we are able to derive the mental compulsion which forces the artist to production, and the æsthetic qualities which give their distinctive character to his productions from the psychological notion of the art-impulse, we are compelled to look elsewhere for the origin and development of the concrete technical medium of which he avails himself in fulfilling his purpose.