WEBVTT

00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:03.417
Man is a singular creature.

00:00:03.417 --> 00:00:08.810
He has a set of gifts that make him unique among the animals:

00:00:08.810 --> 00:00:14.415
so that, unlike them, he is not a figure in the landscape

00:00:14.415 --> 00:00:17.938
- he is the shaper of the landscape.


00:00:24.257 --> 00:00:29.418
Every landscape in the world is full of exact and beautiful adaptations,

00:00:29.418 --> 00:00:36.415
by which an animal fits into its environment like one cog-wheel into another. 


00:00:36.415 --> 00:00:42.306
But nature - that is, evolution - has not fitted man to any specific environment.

00:00:42.306 --> 00:00:47.056
On the contrary, he has a rather crude survival kit;

00:00:47.056 --> 00:00:55.855
and yet - this is the paradox of the human condition - one that fits him to all environments.

00:00:57.008 --> 00:01:04.418
His imagination, his reason, his emotional subtlety and toughness,

00:01:04.418 --> 00:01:10.889
make it possible for him not to accept the environment but to change it.

00:01:10.889 --> 00:01:18.805
And that series of inventions, by which man from age to age has remade his environment,

00:01:18.805 --> 00:01:26.656
is a different kind of evolution - not biological, but cultural evolution.

00:01:26.656 --> 00:01:34.606
I call that brilliant sequence of cultural peaks "The Ascent of Man".


00:01:39.178 --> 00:01:48.888
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.

00:01:49.764 --> 00:01:53.337
When the hunter was brought here into the secret dark

00:01:53.337 --> 00:01:57.307
and the light was suddenly flashed on the pictures,

00:01:57.307 --> 00:02:01.557
he saw the bison as he would have to face him.

00:02:01.557 --> 00:02:04.937
The moment of fear was made present to him;

00:02:04.937 --> 00:02:16.297
his spear-arm flexed with an experience which he would have and which he needed not to be afraid of.


00:02:16.297 --> 00:02:24.778
I think that the power that we see expressed here for the first time is the power of the foward-looking imagination.

00:02:25.162 --> 00:02:32.696
The imagination is a telescope in time, we are looking back at the experience of the past.

00:02:34.126 --> 00:02:40.708
The men who made these paintings, the men who were present, looked through that telescope forward.

00:02:42.185 --> 00:02:45.937
They looked along the ascent of man

00:02:45.937 --> 00:02:56.024
because what we call cultural evolution is essentially a constant growing and widening of the human imagination.

00:02:59.415 --> 00:03:05.806
The men who made the weapons and the men who made the paintings were doing the same thing

00:03:08.559 --> 00:03:20.156
- anticipating a future as only man can do, inferring what is to come from what is here.

00:03:22.418 --> 00:03:33.479
All over these caves the print of the hand says that: 'This is my mark. This is man.'


00:04:10.659 --> 00:04:17.776
We are all afraid - for our confidence, for the future, for the world.

00:04:18.468 --> 00:04:21.397
That is the nature of the human imagination.

00:04:21.805 --> 00:04:34.527
Yet every man, every civilization, has gone forward because of its engagement with what it has set itself to do.

00:04:36.541 --> 00:04:41.076
The personal commitment of a man to his skill,

00:04:41.472 --> 00:04:49.076
the intellectual commitment and the emotional commitment working together as one,

00:04:50.052 --> 00:04:53.342
has made the Ascent of Man.

00:05:30.697 --> 00:05:34.550
Man is unique not because he does science, 


00:05:34.550 --> 00:05:37.776
and his is unique not because he does art,

00:05:37.776 --> 00:05:45.772
but because science and art equally are expressions of his marvelous plasticity of mind.