Man is a singular creature.
He has a set of gifts that make him unique among the animals:
so that, unlike them, he is not a figure in the landscape
- he is the shaper of the landscape.
Every landscape in the world is full of exact and beautiful adaptations,
by which an animal fits into its environment like one cog-wheel into another.
But nature - that is, evolution - has not fitted man to any specific environment.
On the contrary, he has a rather crude survival kit;
and yet - this is the paradox of the human condition - one that fits him to all environments.
His imagination, his reason, his emotional subtlety and toughness,
make it possible for him not to accept the environment but to change it.
And that series of inventions, by which man from age to age has remade his environment,
is a different kind of evolution - not biological, but cultural evolution.
I call that brilliant sequence of cultural peaks "The Ascent of Man".
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.
When the hunter was brought here into the secret dark
and the light was suddenly flashed on the pictures,
he saw the bison as he would have to face him.
The moment of fear was made present to him;
his spear-arm flexed with an experience which he would have and which he needed not to be afraid of.
I think that the power that we see expressed here for the first time is the power of the foward-looking imagination.
The imagination is a telescope in time, we are looking back at the experience of the past.
The men who made these paintings, the men who were present, looked through that telescope forward.
They looked along the ascent of man
because what we call cultural evolution is essentially a constant growing and widening of the human imagination.
The men who made the weapons and the men who made the paintings were doing the same thing
- anticipating a future as only man can do, inferring what is to come from what is here.
All over these caves the print of the hand says that: 'This is my mark. This is man.'
We are all afraid - for our confidence, for the future, for the world.
That is the nature of the human imagination.
Yet every man, every civilization, has gone forward because of its engagement with what it has set itself to do.
The personal commitment of a man to his skill,
the intellectual commitment and the emotional commitment working together as one,
has made the Ascent of Man.
Man is unique not because he does science,
and his is unique not because he does art,
but because science and art equally are expressions of his marvelous plasticity of mind.