146
PARTISAN REVIEW
spends a season building, carving and painting his barque of the pecu–
liar design required for the annual ritual of head-hunting, is exercising
several cultural activities at once; there is no occasion for him to
specify which particular service he is rendering to his community,
to himself or to his gods.
As
civilization advances a considerable
degree of occupational specialization may evince itself: in the New
Hebrides certain islands are said to specialize in particular arts and
crafts, and exchange their wares, or display their accomplishments,
to the reciprocal satisfaction of the members of the archipelago. But
while the individuals of a tribe may have, like the king or the witch–
doctor, separate functions, it is only at a much further stage that a
capacity for abstracting from one another religion, science, politics
and
art
appears. And just as the functional activities of individuals
tend to become hereditary, and hereditary function tends to harden
into class distinction, and class distinction leads to class conflict, so do
religion, politics, science and
art
reach a point at which they dispute
amongst themselves and lay claims against each other. This friction
is, at some stages, highly creative; how far it is the result, and how
far the cause, of increased consciousness need not here be considered.
The tension within the society is a tension also within the mind of
the superior individual: only a very advanced stage of civilization
could produce the
Antigone-for
the clash of laws must have taken
place in society before it could be made articulate by the dramatist
and meet the response from an audience which the dramatist's art
requires. Irt Greece there appears to have been a development of
the phil.osophical mind with which the religious consciousness failed
to keep pace: hence the problems of the Greek dramatists, and the
eventual hypertrophy of skepticism. For the less speculative Romans,
what happened was rather the failure of the religious pattern to
develop with their expanding political organization. In the mediaeval
world a European synthesis of religion and philosophy, of faith and
free enquiry, of devotion and
art,
appeared to reach, with a precarious
tension between Church and State, its nearest approximation. And it
was in the disintegration of
a
culture, that, with the Renaissance,
began the efflorescence of what the nineteenth century, already some–
what retrospectively, was to call "culture."
It is commonly observed that any developing society tends to
greater functional complexity; that function leads to class; that classes
persist after their functions have disappeared and that hereditary
function becomes hereditary pretension. An upper class which has
come to exist only for itself, deprived ·by its own folly or incom–
petence, or by circumstances beyond its control, of its functionaJ
