In every experience of this kind there comes an access of life, as if
one had drunk at a fountain of vitality.
A thrilling chapter in the spiritual history of the race might be
written by bringing together the reports of such experiences which are
to be found in almost all literatures,--experiences which vary greatly
in depth and significance, which have in common the unfailing interest
of discovery and growth. If this collocation of vital contacts could
be expanded so as to include the history of the intellectual commerce
of races, we should be able to read the story of humanity in a new and
searching light. For the transmission of Greek thought and beauty to
the Oriental world, the wide diffusion of Hebrew ideas of man and his
life, the contact of the modern with the antique world in the
Renaissance, for instance, effected changes in the spiritual
constitution of man more subtle, pervasive, and radical than we are
yet in a position to understand. The spiritual history of men is
largely a history of discovery,--the record of those fruitful moments
when we come upon new things, and our ideas are swiftly or slowly
expanded to include them.
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