20 Making of the Complete Citizen
points-of-view will be presented with greater self-confidence
in the future, and as we get to understand them we shall
not wish to force our traditions indiscriminately upon them,
but we will get down to our own essentials, which I believe
will, when they are tested, be found to be of universal sig-
nificance. Further consideration of this will be given in the
next lecture.
The theme of this lecture has been that Tradition is a
mighty influence in culture, and that it conserves the gains
of the Past. It brings the fruits of experience down to us
on the river of time, a ceaseless traffic that enriches each
generation afresh for its few years in the continuing City
of the human race. There is a saying of Pascal which il-
luminates this idea : “All the succession of men, throughout
the course of so many centuries, must be considered as the
same man who always subsists and is forever learning.”
As the individual develops by using aright the experience
of others, so the culture of each age should be richer than
that of any previous age, inasmuch as we are maturing. In
its infancy the world held many views that now we know
were the result of imagination, not of verified observation.
“When I was a child I thought as a child, I spake as a child,
I understood as a child, but now that I am become a man
that child’s world has passed away.” But though that
world has passed away the culture of earlier days has helped
to make us what we are, and much of it is permanent. Per-
manent chiefly not in accumulated knowledge, though that
is important, but in the more matured faculties that have
been transmitted. To quote Pascal again, who was one of
the first to enunciate the idea of the progress of the race :
“Those whom we call the ancients were veritably new in
all things, and properly speaking were human beings in in-
fancy: since we have added to their knowledge the experi-