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Now, it is upon this imperishable food which the past has stored up
through the genius of great artists that later generations feed and
nourish themselves. It is through intimate contact with these
fundamental conceptions, worked out with such infinite pain and
patience, that the individual experience is broadened to include the
experience of the race. This contact is the mystery as it is the
source of culture. No one can explain the transmission of power from a
book to a reader; but all history bears witness to the fact that such
transmissions are made. Sometimes, as during what is called the
Revival of Learning, the transmission is so general and so genuine
that the life of an entire society is visibly quickened and enlarged;
indeed, it is not too much to say that an entire civilisation feels
the effect. The transmission of power, the transference of vitality,
from books to individuals are so constant and common that they are
matters of universal experience. Most men of any considerable culture
date the successive enlargements of their intellectual lives from the
reading, at successive periods, of the books of insight and
power,--the books that deal with life at firsthand.
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