e, in Shelley's
"Hellas":

"The world's great age begins anew,
The golden years return,
The earth doth like a snake renew
Her winter weeds outworn;
Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam,
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.
. . . . . . . . .
"Another Athens shall arise,
And to remoter time
Bequeath, like sunset to the skies,
The splendor of its prime;
And leave, if nought so bright can live,
All earth can take or Heaven can give."

It is not surprising that men with an eye fixed on the future
should develop a contempt or an obliviousness of the past.
Utopians nearly always start with "a world various and beautiful
and new."

Perhaps the chief ingredient in such discounting of all past
history is the rebel temperament which wants to break away
from what it regards as the chains, the dead weight, the ruts of
tradition. It cheerfully says, "Nous changerons tout cela,"
and does not stop to discriminate between the _roads_ and the
_ruts_ that have been made by people in the past.

These two temperaments,[1] play a large part in determining
attitudes toward the past. The one regards with awe and
reverence past achievement, and rests his faith on the
experiments which have been tested and proved by time. The
other, to state the position extremely, regards each day as the
possible glorious dawn of a completely new world. The first
attitude, when intemperately preached and practiced, becomes
an uncritical veneration of the past; the second, an uncritical
disparagement. We shall briefly examine each.

[Footnote 1: One is reminded of the song of the sentry before the
House of Parliament in Gilbert and Sullivan's "Iolanthe";

"'T is strange how Nature doth contrive
That every little boy or gal,
That's born into the world alive,
Is either a little Liberal,
Or else a little Conservative!"]

UNCRITICAL VENERATION OF THE PAST. The extreme form of
uncritical veneration of the past may be said to take the position
that old things are good simply because they are _old_; new
things are evil simply because they are _new_. Institutions,
Ideas, Customs are, like wines, supposed to attain quality
with age. A custom, a law, a code of morals is defined or
maintained on the ground of its ancient--and honorable--history,
of the great span of years during which it has been
current, of the generation after generation that has lived
under its