MENTAL INHERITANCE 459 



platitude and dogma, or lias denied to him the opportunity of spending 

 his energies in the cultivation of a land of promise. 



The kindling enthusiasm of the man of science must not, however, 

 be confused with the philistine's boast that history is a wreck from 

 which only he and his time have been saved. Opportunity which in- 

 spires the scholar inflates the time-server and intoxicates the anarchist. 

 The difference between these persons rests at last upon temporal per- 

 spective, or the want of it ; for it is the apprehension of new opportuni- 

 ties and new needs in the light of old accomplishments that leads to 

 profitable reconstruction of human knowledge. In mechanical inven- 

 tion, the new model may cause the old to be cast upon the rubbish- 

 heap; but in man's interpretation of the world, old theories and old 

 points of view which have served their generation are never discarded ; 

 they still mark the stages of human acquisition and take their place in 

 the development of science. Without a knowledge of them, and of their 

 relation to present problems, no man, however ingenious or fertile, 

 should hope to do more than a journeyman's work in the free advance- 

 ment of learning. 



But even when we know the general history of thought and the spe- 

 cial histories of our own small divisions of human knowledge, we are 

 apt to overlook the fact that, in a large sense, civilization itself is a 

 matter of the moment, which may be viewed in the light of a broader 

 perspective. Civilization we measure by hundreds and thousands of 

 years. For example, we trace the Mediterranean cultures eight or ten 

 or twelve thousand 3'ears, and then we lose the thread; but the whole 

 history of man we reckon in geological epochs. We find his footprints 

 stamped everywhere upon the Quaternary earth, and we find what appear 

 to be vestiges of him in the deeper deposits of the Tertiary. Through- 

 out the brief day of his written history we study him in a long series of 

 related disciplines which we call " the humanities " ; while we hand 

 over the unmeasured period of his whole antecedent career to the single 

 science of anthropology. We glance with admiration at his morning 

 work in iron and bronze and brass, his noontime of Athenian culture, 

 his late hours of reflection and invention, and we seek however feebly 

 to illumine the night of his future; but we tend to overlook the an- 

 tiquity of man, the record of other days and years, and to avoid the 

 question whether civilization is not, after all, still in the experimental 

 stage — whether we ourselves are not next-door neighbors to the 

 barbarian. 



When we regard the rapid accumulations of a few thousand years 

 of culture, we realize that civilization lays upon the human mind a 

 staggering load of traditional knowledge and traditional duty. In 

 " Darwinism and Politics " the late Professor Eitchie has defined civil- 

 ization as " the sum of human contrivances which enable human beings 



