nkind learning by the lessons
of history, of knowledge being handed down from one age to another, and
growing in the process. That is one of the most inspiring ideas in
modern thought: a German writer has spoken of history as the long
Odyssey of the human spirit, the common mind of Man coming at last
through its wanderings to find out what it really wants, and where its
true home lies.

And here, significantly enough, we find we are brought back in our
modern way to something very like Plato's own conception of an eternal
unchanging Reality. There are endless problems in the whole conception
of the Eternal that I am quite unable even to attempt; but this much at
least seems clear to me, that the whole idea of mankind learning by the
experience of History, implies something of permanent value running
through that experience. The very thought of continued progress implies
that man can look back at the successive stages of the Past and say of
each: In that lay values which I, to-day and always, can recognize as
good, although I believe we have more good now. Seeley speaks in a noble
passage of how religion might conceive a progressive revelation which
was, in a sense, the same through all its stages, and yet was a growing
thing:--'each new revelation asserts its own superiority to those which
went before,' but the superiority is 'not of one thing to another
thing--but of the developed thing to the undeveloped'. 'It is thus', he
writes, 'that the ages should behave to one another.' This is the true
'understanding and concert with time'.[10] And though Plato does not
live in the thought of historic progress, yet such a conception of
progress which recognizes at different stages different expressions,
more or less adequate, of one eternal value, such a way of thinking is
entirely Platonic. When we look back at history in this mood we think
not only of grasping the right principles for the Future, but of
rejoicing in the definite achievements of the Past, and we feel this
most poignantly, I think, of the achievements won by the spirit of
Beauty. Great works of Art we are accustomed actually to call immortal,
and we mean by this not merely that we think they will always be famous,
but that there is something in them that makes it impossible for them
ever to be superseded. In themselves they are inexhaustible: if they
cease to interest us, it is our fault and not theirs. We may want more,
we do want more, where they came from, b