udy, say, of Latin and Greek, according to his estimate
of the desirability or undesirability of those consequences.
If he finds, for example, that the study of Latin does promote
general literary appreciation, his decision that it should or
should not be continued will depend on his opinion of the value
of general literary appreciation as compared with other values
in an industrial civilization. Similarly, with "freedom of contract,"
"freedom of the seas," military service, bi-cameral
systems, party caucuses, presidential veto, and all the other
political and social heritages of the past.

[Footnote 1: The situation in the case of outworn social
institutions is paralleled in the case of the human appendix,
once possessing a function in the digestive system of primitive
man, but now useless and likely on occasion to become a
positive disutility.]

But a man who impartially examines the past will usually
exhibit also an appreciation of its attainments and a sense of
the present good to which it has been instrumental. He will
not glibly dismiss institutions, habits, methods of life that
are the slow accumulations of centuries. He will have a
sense of the continuous efforts and energies that have gone
into the making of contemporary civilization. He will have,
in suggesting ruthless innovations, a sobering sense of the
gradual evolution that has made present institutions, habits,
ideas, what they are.

The student of the past knows, moreover, that the present
without its background of history is literally meaningless.
In the words of a well-known student of the development of
human culture:

Progress, degradation, survival, modification, are all modes of the
connection that binds together the complex network of civilization.
It needs but a glance into the trivial details of our own daily life to
set us thinking how far we are really its originators, and how far
but the transmitters and modifiers of the results of long past ages.
Looking round the rooms we live in, we may try here how far he who
knows only his own time can be capable of rightly comprehending
even that. Here is the honeysuckle of Assyria, there the fleur-de-lis
of Anjou, a cornice with a Greek border runs round the ceiling, the
style of Louis XIV and its parent the Renaissance share the looking
glass between them. Transformed, shifted or mutilated, such elements
of art still carry their history plainly stamped upon them....
It is thus even with the f