d. And that these records are in the
form of a few symbols; but symbols which, to those who can
interpret or disintegrate them, can yield the whole story. What
if the amount of the burden of history, which seems so vast to us
who know so very little of it, were in reality, if we could know
it all, a thing that would put but slight tax on the memory; a
thing we might carry with us in a few slight formulae, a few
simple symbols? I believe that it is so; and that we may make a
beginning, and go some little way towards guessing what these
formulae are.

As thus: A given race flowered and passed; it had so many
centuries of history before its flowering; it died, and left
something behind. Greece, for example. We may know very little
--you and I may know very little--of the details of Greek history.
We cannot, perhaps, remember the date of Aegospotami, or what
happened at Plataea: we may have the vaguest notion of the
import of Aeschylus, or Sophocles, or Plato. But still there is
a certain color in our conscious perceptions which comes from
Greece: the 'glory that was Greece' means something, is a
certain light within the consciousness, to everyone of us. The
Greeks added something to the wealth of the human spirit, which
we all may share in, and do. An atmosphere is left, which
surrounds and adheres to the many tangible memorials; just as an
atmosphere is left by the glories of the Cinquecento in Italy,
with its many tangible memorials.

But indeed, we may go further, and say that an atmosphere is
left, and that we can feel it, by many ages and cultures
which have left no tangible memorials at all; or but few and
uninterpretable ones, like the Celtic. And that each has
developed some mood, some indefinable inward color--which we
perceive and inherit. Each different: you cannot mistake the
Chinese or the Celtic color for the Greek; thought it might be
hard to define your perception of either, or of their difference.
It would be hard to say, for instance, that this one was crimson,
the other blue; not quite so hard to say that this one affects
us as crimson does, that other as blue does. And yet we can
see, I think, that by chasing our impressions to their source,
there might be some way of presenting them in symbolic form.
There might be some way of reducing what we feel from the Greeks,
or Chinese, or Celts, into a word, a sentence; of writing it down
even in a single hieroglyph, of which the elements w