the great altar of learning we worship, our fears
increase that these heaped offerings will stifle the sacred fire. This
weighty weapon of letters forged by generations, this mighty armor and
panoply of learning on whose myriad rivets so many hammers have rung,
has outgrown the individual, and we begin to doubt its ultimate value to
society.

Thus men ever err in their early thought on the new duties and fresh
responsibilities created for men by associate man. In the field of
organized life the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts.
The body is more than an aggregate of cells. The soul wiser than all its
faculties. A nation more puissant than any census of its citizens. Man
more than men. The secret of this supremacy over the sterile synthesis
of sense, the root and germ mastery over the mere mechanics of life, and
the bald and barren arithmetic of existence, lies in the capacity to
know the present and to remember the past--in consciousness, out of
which conscience grows, and in memory, Mnemosyne, mother of all the
Muses and parent of all learning. Rightly in all history do we measure
the value of every human society to Humanity by its power to awake to
its own existence and be aware of its own past. This is the

--"mystery in the soul of state
Which hath an operation more divine
Than breath or pen can give expression to--"

This exalts the microscopic municipalities of Greece. This abases the
dumb millions of Asia. Our own articulate millions, deficient in much,
have done most for the world, not by material development, but by
demonstrating that 62,000,000 spread over a continent can enjoy a
consciousness as constant, continuous, and complete as the handful of
citizens in the market-place of a Greek city, less in population that
the ward in which we stand, smaller in area than the open spaces about
this University. This general capacity to think as one and remember as a
whole differences modern societies from all the past, save that of
Greece. This has brought the awakening of nations in this century, a
mightier resurrection with power than the awakening of men in the
sixteenth century. With the future awakening of man the work will be
complete. Until it is, national consciousness and national memory,
creating conscious national life, are the determining conditions of
human progress. The problem which Greece solved by making its
communities small, the modern world triumphantly meets by ma