f the evolution of life on
earth. So far as we can see, posterity will be for countless
generations physically similar to ourselves, as they certainly
will, unless all records or evidences of the fact are obscured,
trace their ancestry continuously back to us.

Not only is there continuity of physical descent, however,
but continuity of cultural achievement. The past, in any
literal temporal sense, is over and done with. The Romans
are physically dead, as are the generations of barbarians of
the Dark Ages, and all the inhabitants of mediaeval and
modern Europe, save our own contemporaries. Yesterdays
are irrevocably over. The past, in any real sense, exists
only in the form of achievements that have been handed down
to us from previous generations. The only parts of the past
that survive physically are the actual material products and
achievements of bygone generations, the temples and the
cathedrals, the sculptures and the manuscripts, the roads
and the relics of earlier civilizations. Even these exist in the
present; they are evidences, memorials, mementos of the
past. These heritages from past civilizations may be interesting,
intrinsically, as in the case of paintings and statues, or
useful, as in the case of roads, reservoirs, or harbors.

But we inherit the past in a more vital sense. We inherit
ways of thought and action, social systems, scientific and
industrial methods, manners and morals, educational bequests
and ideals, all that we have and are. Without these, each
generation would have to start anew. If the whole of existing
society were destroyed, and a newborn generation could be
miraculously preserved to maturity, its members would have
to start on the same level, with the same ignorances, uncertainties,
and impotences as primitive savages.

In order to make the nature and variety of our abject dependence
on the past clear, we have only to consider our language, our laws,
our political and social institutions, our knowledge and education,
our view of this world and the next, our tastes and the means of
gratifying them. On every hand the past dominates and controls
us, for the most part unconsciously and without protest on our part.
We are in the main its willing adherents. The imagination of the
most radically-minded cannot transcend any great part of the ideas
and customs transmitted to him. When once we grasp this truth,
we shall, according to our mood, humbly congratulate ourselves
that ... we a