Even in the eighteenth century, before either the French Revolution or the paleotechnic revolution had been consummated, it had become the fashion to… - Lewis Mumford

Efflorescence is an archetypal example of nature's untrammeled creativity; and the fact that floral beauty cannot be explained or justified on purely utilitarian grounds is precisely what makes this explosion so wonderful-and so typical of other life-processes. Biological creativity and the esthetic creativity that so often accompanies it exist for their own sake and transcend the organism's earlier limitations. If survival were all that mattered, life might have remained in the primal ooze or crept no further upward than the lichens. Though one may abstractly conceive a world with neither colors nor any richness of living structures, that muted world is not the actual world of life.

The fundamental values of a true community are elsewhere: in love, poetry, disinterested thought, the free use of the imagination, the pursuit of non-utilitarian activities, the production of non-profitmaking goods, the employment of non-consumable wealth - here are the sustaining values of a living culture.

"Now compare this mechanical world view, with its exclusive emphasis on the quantitative, the measurable, the external, with that of one of the most primitive of known races and cultures, the Australian aborigines. According to a recent interpreter, Kaj Birket-Smith, "The fundamental idea in the Australian's concept of life is that there is no sharp division between man and nature, between the quick and the dead, nor even a gap between past, present, and future. Nature can as little exist without man as man without nature, and yesterday and tomorrow, in a manner inexplicable to us, merge into today.

Whatever the deficiencies in the Australian aborigine's habits of observation or in his symbolic formulation of his experience, it will become plain, as the theme of this book develops, that the Australian's 'primitive' view is in fact far less primitive, biologically and culturally speaking, than that of the mechanical world picture,f or it includes those many dimensions of life that Kepler, Galileo, and their successors intentionally excluded, as spoiling the accuracy of their observations and the elegance of their descriptions.