, is why the word infantine was rightly used in our first
paragraph. For we may ask why, if man be millions of years old, any
record of progress should be a matter of only a few thousand
years--perhaps not more than fifteen or twenty. The answer, I believe,
is that traditional progress depends upon the possibility of tradition.
Now speech, apart from writing, involves the possibility of tradition
from generation to generation, and I am very sure that "Man before
speech" is a myth; the more we learn of the anthropoid apes the surer we
may be of that. But, after all, the possibilities of progress dependent
upon aural memory are sadly limited; not only because it is easy to
forget, but because it is also conspicuously easy to distort, as a
familiar round-game testifies. The greatest of all the epochs in human
history was that which saw the genesis of written speech. I believe that
hundreds of thousands, nay millions, of preceding years were
substantially sterile just because the educational acquirements of
individuals could be transmitted to their children neither in the
germ-plasm (for we know such transmission to be impossible), nor outside
the germ-plasm, by means of writing. The invention of written language
accounts, then, we may suppose, for the otherwise incomprehensible
disparity between the blank record of long ages, and the great
achievement of recent history--an achievement none the less striking if
we remember that the historical epoch includes a thousand years of
darkness. Thus, as was said at the Royal Institution in 1907, when
discussing the nature of progress, we may argue in a new sense that the
historians have made history: it is the possibility of recording that
has given us something to record.

Now, it is in terms of this latter kind of progress that our duty to the
past, as we conceive it, may be defined. And in its terms also must we
define the grounds of our veneration for the past. None of us invented
language, spoken or written; nor yet numbers, nor the wheel, nor much
else. We see further than our ancestors because we stand upon their
shoulders, and, as Coleridge hinted, this may be so even though we be
dwarfs and they were giants. Some of us see this. How can we fail to do
so? And the past becomes in our eyes a very real thing, to which we are
so greatly indebted that we should even live for it. But there is a
great danger, dependent upon a great error, here. Let us consider what
is our right at