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Man is a singular creature.

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He has a set of gifts that make him unique among the animals:

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so that, unlike them, he is not a figure in the landscape

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- he is the shaper of the landscape.


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Every landscape in the world is full of exact and beautiful adaptations,

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by which an animal fits into its environment like one cog-wheel into another. 


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But nature - that is, evolution - has not fitted man to any specific environment.

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On the contrary, he has a rather crude survival kit;

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and yet - this is the paradox of the human condition - one that fits him to all environments.

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His imagination, his reason, his emotional subtlety and toughness,

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make it possible for him not to accept the environment but to change it.

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And that series of inventions, by which man from age to age has remade his environment,

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is a different kind of evolution - not biological, but cultural evolution.

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I call that brilliant sequence of cultural peaks "The Ascent of Man".


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In these paintings the hunter was made familiar with dangers which he knew he had to face but to which he had not yet come.

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When the hunter was brought here into the secret dark

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and the light was suddenly flashed on the pictures,

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he saw the bison as he would have to face him.

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The moment of fear was made present to him;

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his spear-arm flexed with an experience which he would have and which he needed not to be afraid of.


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I think that the power that we see expressed here for the first time is the power of the foward-looking imagination.

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The imagination is a telescope in time, we are looking back at the experience of the past.

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The men who made these paintings, the men who were present, looked through that telescope forward.

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They looked along the ascent of man

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because what we call cultural evolution is essentially a constant growing and widening of the human imagination.

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The men who made the weapons and the men who made the paintings were doing the same thing

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- anticipating a future as only man can do, inferring what is to come from what is here.

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All over these caves the print of the hand says that: 'This is my mark. This is man.'


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We are all afraid - for our confidence, for the future, for the world.

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That is the nature of the human imagination.

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Yet every man, every civilization, has gone forward because of its engagement with what it has set itself to do.

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The personal commitment of a man to his skill,

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the intellectual commitment and the emotional commitment working together as one,

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has made the Ascent of Man.

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Man is unique not because he does science, 


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and his is unique not because he does art,

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but because science and art equally are expressions of his marvelous plasticity of mind.