ABSTRACT
In the absence of indirect communication people had to come into face-to-face contact in order to feel social excitement and rise to the higher phases of consciousness. In tribal life, the conditions did not admit of wider unification, public consciousness could be only local in scope. Beyond its narrow range the cords which held life together were of a subconscious character—heredity, of course, with its freight of mental and social tendency; oral tradition, often vague and devious, and a mass of custom that was revered without being understood. The central fact of history, from a psychological point of view, may be said to be the gradual enlargement of social consciousness and rational cooperation. The mind constantly, though perhaps not regularly, extends the sphere within which it makes its higher powers valid. In the later Empire, it seems plain that social mechanism had grown in such a way as to shackle the human mind.
