d towers, ancient rooms, become symbols of great and
dignified achievements; ceremonies come to be invested with
a serious beauty and memorable charm. They become reminders
of a "torch to be carried on," of a spirit to be cherished
and kept alive, of a history to be carried on or a purpose
or an ideal to be fulfilled. As we shall see in a moment, this
sense for the past, which, as Santayana says, makes a man
loyal to the sources of his being, has both its virtues and vices.
It is of immense value in preserving continuity and cultural
integration, in keeping many men continuously moving toward
a single fixed end. It may also wrap dangerously irrelevant
habits and institutions in a saving--and illusive--halo.

There are, on the other hand, individuals with very little
sense for tradition. This may be accounted for in some cases
by a marked aesthetic insensibility, which sees in ritual, ceremony,
or habit, merely the literal, without any appreciation
at all of its symbolic significance.[1] In other cases, individuals
are unsusceptible and hostile to tradition, because they
have themselves been socially disinherited. This is illustrated
not infrequently in the case of foreigners who, for one reason
or another, have left and lost interest in their native land, and
become men without a country.

[Footnote 1: This is illustrated by the crass excesses of certain
radical satirists of religious forms. Those who are the enemies of
religion for economic, social, or intellectualistic reasons combine
a singular sense of the literal absurdities of religious forms
with a marked insensibility to their symbolic values. One may find
interesting examples, from Voltaire to Robert Ingersoll.]

There are others by temperament rebellious and iconoclastic,
who combine a keen sense of present difficulties and problems
with small reverence, use for, or interest in the past, and
small imaginative sympathy with it. The past is to them a
"sea of errors." They regard all past achievements as bad
scribblings which must be erased, so that we may start with
a clean slate. There have been included among such, great
historical reformers. Bentham's enthusiasm for progress led
him into most intemperate attacks on history and historical
method. The most noted of the eighteenth-century philosophers
saw nothing but evil in tradition. Such sentiments
were echoed in the early nineteenth century by Shelley, Godwin,
and their circle, as expressed, for exampl