ABSTRACT
Nature provides the materials for this change, but man himself must effect it. In essence, it rests on a constant effort at self-identification, self-affirmation, self-discipline, and self-development: if much of this is routinised and imposed by the inherited culture pattern, it still was the outcome, in the first place, of wilful effort. Agriculture made it possible for people to live generation after generation in little hamlets or villages; and as the food supply expanded, more such settlements must have come into existence, for with the increase of the population fresh land would be put under cultivation. Archaic man is the conservator of life: he guards the future by holding tight to the past and, above all, to his ancestors. Though the words blood and soil have been degraded in our time by degraded men, their concrete realities pervade the archaic tradition and come down to us today even in the inflated stereotypes of patriotism and nationalism.
