Sooner or later this choice would have confronted mankind. The sudden
development of atomic science did but precipitate and render rapid
and dramatic a clash between the new and the customary that had been
gathering since ever the first flint was chipped or the first fire built
together. From the day when man contrived himself a tool and suffered
another male to draw near him, he ceased to be altogether a thing of
instinct and untroubled convictions. From that day forth a widening
breach can be traced between his egotistical passions and the social
need. Slowly he adapted himself to the life of the homestead, and his
passionate impulses widened out to the demands of the clan and the
tribe. But widen though his impulses might, the latent hunter and
wanderer and wonderer in his imagination outstripped their development.
He was never quite subdued to the soil nor quite tamed to the home.
Everywhere it needed teaching and the priest to keep him within the
bounds of the plough-life and the beast-tending. Slowly a vast system
of traditional imperatives superposed itself upon his instincts,
imperatives that were admirably fitted to make him that cultivator, that
cattle-mincer, who was for twice ten thousand years the normal man.
And, unpremeditated, undesired, out of the accumulations of his tilling
came civilisation.
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