re permitted to stand on the giant's shoulders, and
enjoy an outlook that would be quite hidden to us, if we had to trust
to our own short legs; or we may resentfully chafe at our bonds and,
like Prometheus, vainly strive to wrest ourselves from the rock of the
past, in our eagerness to bring relief to the suffering children of men.

In any case, whether we bless or curse the past, we are inevitably
its offspring, and it makes us its own long before we realize it. It is,
indeed, almost all that we can have.[1]

[Footnote 1: Robinson: _The New History_, pp. 256-57.]

The cultural achievements of the past, which we inherit
chiefly as social habits, are obviously not transmitted to us
physically, as are the original human traits with which this
volume has so far been chiefly concerned. They are not in our
blood; they are acquired like other habits, through contact
with others and through repeated practice.

We are thus to a very large extent conditioned by the past.
It is as if we had inherited a fortune composed of various kinds
of properties, houses, books, automobiles, warehouses, musical
instruments, and in addition, trade concessions, business
secrets, formulaes, methods, and good-will. Our activities will
be limited in measure by the extent of the property, its constituent
items, and the repair in which we keep it. We may
squander or misinvest our principal, as when we use scientific
knowledge for dangerous or dubious aims, for example, for
conquest or rapine. We may add to it, as in the development
of the sciences and industrial arts. We may, so to speak, live
on the income. Such is the case when a society ceases to be
progressive, and fails to add anything to a highly developed
traditional culture, as happened strikingly in the case of
China. Again we may have inherited "white elephants,"
which may be of absolutely no use to us, encumbrances of
which we cannot easily rid ourselves, influential ideas which
are no longer adequate to our present situation, obsolete
emotions, methods, or institutions. We may allow our cultural
inheritance, through bad education, to fall into disrepair and
decay.

Since we are so dependent on the past, our attitude toward
it, which in turn determines the use we make of it, is of the most
crucial significance. The several characteristic and varying
attitudes toward the past which are so markedly current are
not determined solely by logical considerations. For individuals
and soc