lity it is alive; and, for many of us, endowed with a profounder,
more ardent life than either present or future. In reality this dead
city is often the hot-bed of our existence; and, in accordance with the
spirit in which men return to it, shall some find all their wealth
there, and others lose what they have.

2

Our conception of the past has much in common with our conception of
love and happiness, destiny, justice, and most of the vague but
therefore not less potent spiritual organisms that stand for the mighty
forces we obey. Our ideas have been handed down to us ready-made by
our predecessors; and even when our second consciousness wakes, and,
proud in its conviction that henceforth nothing shall be accepted
blindly, proceeds most carefully to investigate these ideas, it will
squander its time questioning those that loudly protest their right to
be heard, and pay no heed to the others close by, that as yet, perhaps,
have said nothing. Nor have we, as a rule, far to go to discover these
others. They are in us and of us; they wait for us to address them.
They are not idle, notwithstanding their silence. Amid the noise and
babble of the crowd they are tranquilly directing a portion of our real
life; and, as they are nearer to truth than their self-satisfied
sisters, they will often be far more simple, and far more beautiful too.

3

Among the most stubborn of these ready-made ideas are those that
preside over our conception of the past, and render it a force as
imposing and rigid as destiny; a force that indeed becomes destiny
working backwards, with its hand outstretched to the destiny that
burrows ahead, to which it transmits the last link of our chains. The
one thrusts us back, the other urges us forward, with a like
irresistible violence. But the violence of the past is perhaps more
terrible and more alarming. One may disbelieve in destiny. It is a
god whose onslaught many have never experienced. But no one would
dream of denying the oppressiveness of the past. Sooner or later its
effect must inevitably be felt. Those even who refuse to admit the
intangible will credit the past, which their finger can touch, with all
the mystery, the influence, the sovereign intervention whereof they
have stripped the powers that they have dethroned; thus rendering it
the almost unique and therefore more dreadful god of their depopulated
Olympus.

4

The force of the past is indeed one of the heaviest t