Microcosmus: an essay concerning man and his relation to the world
This it is what we mean by the Microcosmic Order — the impulses ever fresh and ever the same, out of which have sprung the many-hued blossoms of history, the eternal cycle in which human fates revolve. It is indeed true that this order may not be strictly a cycle, but that the apparent recurrence may include some hidden progress.
Still, even we, who live in times in which at any rate the outward splendour of progress is unfolded more vividly than ever before our eyes, even we may say to ourselves that the true value of our inner life is but slowly if at all increased by all this.
There arise no fresh springs of enjoyment which had not flowed before, or if indeed the springs are new, yet that which they distribute is still but the old pleasure for which our nature is designed; our cognition may be enlarged boundlessly, but the results almost always lead us back to thoughts which men have had long ago. It seems as though former ages had extracted from different and perhaps poorer material those same treasures of happy or exalted feeling which we with far greater expenditure of scientific and technical power imagine we are discovering anew.
In the ordinary view, all our labour is for the most part only a more extensive preparation for life and not itself a fuller life, though indeed we frankly confess that this is not altogether true. Progressive culture is not unlike a majestic waterfall which, seen from a distance, seems to promise great things, and which yet when we look nearer does not appear to shower upon the soil of life a greater amount of refreshing and really fertilizing spray than was afforded for the refreshment and satisfaction of the quieter life of antiquity by the more modest stream of a less splendid civilisation.
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