Art Is Unique

A portion of G.K. Chesterton's reflections on cave paintings, and what they tell us about man:

It is useless to begin by saying that everything was
slow and smooth and a mere matter of development and degree. For in the
plain matter like the pictures there is in fact not a trace of any such
development or degree. Monkeys did not begin pictures and men finish them;
Pithecanthropus did not draw a reindeer badly and Homo Sapiens draw it well.
The higher animals did not draw better and better portraits; the dog did not
paint better in his best period than in his early bad manner as a jackal; the wild
horse was not an Impressionist and the race-horse a Post-Impressionist. All we
can say of this notion of reproducing things in shadow or representative shape
is that it exists nowhere in nature except in man; and that we cannot even talk
about it without treating man as something separate from nature. In other
words, every sane sort of history must begin with man as man, a thing standing
absolute and alone. How he came there, or indeed how anything else came
there, is a thing for theologians and philosophers and scientists and not for
historians.