ABSTRACT

I reckon time not by years but by generations, for these seem to me a far more realistic historical measure. The vast heritage of human experience has to be passed from one generation to another, re-learned three times a century, or lost for ever or be painfully rediscovered. Each of us must absorb what he can from the still living generations before his own; make it over in the light of his own experience and the experience of his own time and society; and offer it consciously and unconsciously, to influence for good or ill the inheritance of his younger peers. (He cannot transmit what they do not accept.) Even the magic of the recorded word survives only in so far as each generation prizes it sufficiently to preserve it and to study it. What we learn comes from the experiences of living and almost entirely from the experience of living with living others; and what we leave behind us is the difference which living with us has made on our contemporaries.