{ } = word or expression can't be understood
{word} = hard to understand, might be this

...in the name of the men in the arms, in the ROTC. And so I promised them to end on Monday, as I told -- at 2:30. Are these gentlemen without uniform here today? I am very grateful that this has worked out. I wanted to have you, but since it was printed, I foresaw terribly much red tape, and I wanted to get out of it. And he promised me that it was a misprint, you see, and that he was at fault, and that he had told you beforehand you could take the course. So, I'm very pleased.

If you have -- have to have more chairs, I think you should place them right here--that's probably the best thing--instead of going behind the -- no, no. Don't stand there, Sir. That's an impossible place. Take the chairs--they are all movable, these chairs--and put them over there. And here are single seat -- here, I see, all your -- all your coats et cetera can go on these chairs back here. But here are seats. Come forward.

(Someone's sitting there.)

No. We have one, two, three -- three seats. Four -- more to come. Here is one more seat. Come on.

(Someone's sitting there. He'll be right back.)

Oh.

Now with regard to the technical -- -calities of the course, I will re- -- have to repeat once more that there is a book in the bookstore, The Driving Power of Western Civilization, which I want you to acquire for the course. It's about -- by myself. And it's a -- the second assignment is this pamphlet, "Time-bettering Days," which you find at the reserve desk, and -- under "Philosophy 58," and I want you to read it right away, because it is the foundation of your own first term paper. There are other books in -- on reserve. And I would appreciate it if some one of you would overcome his revulsion against reading and -- and look at them. I have put there Toynbee. I have put there -- Spengler. And even if you should decide not to read these books--I won't make them assigned reading, because I don't want to spoil the pleasure of reading, by assignments. They are not textbooks which one can assign without danger. They are very -- books of genius. And I want you at least to go through the table of contents very carefully. That's sometimes a very remarkable and fruitful work, to become conscious of what a man tries to do in a book. And you become conscious of this sometimes better by studying the table of contents than by reading the text, in which you

can get lost, easily.

There are other pamphlets of mine, when we come later to them. But it's no harm done if you would plunge into their reading right away. We make -- there are not enough copies. There are no 65 copies, so at one time or another, one will have to wait for the oth- -- for the other man in reading. And I said -- who was not here yesterday? So for those, I think it is important to know that I want you to go right at the -- at the reading of this pamphlet so that we can get by. I have made it a two-day loan. And I should think that anybody can read it in two days under the condition that you take copious notes, and become aware what you have really been introduced into.

The topic of last -- the last meeting I have now to bring back to you, because some of you haven't been here. And that will be a principle of the whole course--those of you have taken courses--that we can have reports. I shall distribute the -- the reports in -- at the beginning of next week, because only then do I know who is here. And I attach great significance to a report. It's -- a high percentage of your mark is made by the class report. And when a man has a Cminus or a D in a class report, gentlemen, he can't possibly get a good mark. And we shall have no finals in this course. It is -- very important to know all the -- every one of you will write two class reports. We shall have a quiz, and we shall have a term paper. And these will be the four requirements. The course will end at the end of April--I told this -- to you before--and -- when I will have to leave here. So a quiz, a term paper, and two reports will be just the basis for my grading you. And that's why I want you to give some importance and weight to the reports.

Is there anything else of a technical nature? Would somebody -- would be good enough to remind me of? Well, Mr. -- the -- the proctor, the monitor here will have to ask you to keep your seats, because we have to keep attendance. And the department, as you know--and probably other departments, too--have made a strict ruling: you can't have more than five cuts without being thrown out of this course. And one of you was very inventive. He -- he had six cuts, so he went belatedly to the dean and got the dean to excuse afterwards. But that's not very advisable in general, because the dean may not always grant it.

If I -- I shall give a title now myself, and report myself on the last lecture, as you are expected to do. I'll give you of course a model report. It will be excellent. And -- I would call it "False Eternity." "The False Eternities." This course is called "Eternal Horizons of Mankind." But in the process of mentioning this, such a title, a man becomes aware that for you, eternity means absolutely nothing. And I pointed out last time that even a Roman Catholic or a Greek Catholic will not change his behavior today because the punishments -- eternal punishments

in hell threaten him. Eternity has lost its sting. You cannot expect anybody to be moved, as Dante was moved, by the eternity of hell, or eternity of purgatory, you see. You just don't believe it. Eternity has lost all connection with us for good reason. Because the philosophers, the idealists, the Thomists, and the Cartesians, and the Kantians, and the -- all the philosophers of the last 900 years have grecianized eternity, and have made it into a lifeless thing, something without time. For you, eternity is something outside of time.

Now gentlemen, that doesn't exist. That's nonsense. There is nothing outside of time of which you or I have any notion. We are in time, and therefore to speak of eternity is just a pipe dream. You can speak of it, but without experience. It's just a pious pretense. And therefore, gentlemen, the eternal horizons of mankind obviously are not those things that exist outside of time. I know of no such thing, and Christ didn't know of any such thing. He only knew of eternity within time.

"False eternity" then could be the -- the -- the object of the last lecture, because I tried to introduce you into the conditions of the transmission and inheritance of acquired qualities of the human race. And I tried to tell you that this course is devoted to the description of the acquisition of new qualities that enter the human race at a certain moment in history, and then are appropriated by every sequ- -- following generation.

So the -- these -- inheritance of acquired faculties is the -- the topic of this course; it should be the topic of history. But our historians have preferred to only deal with singular events, with anecdotes, with this thing or the other. And they have never distinguished in the last hundred years at least, between the lasting acquisitions of the race, and the accidents--like the earthquake, as -- I mentioned it--or the eruption of a volcano. And we made a distinction and said the eruption of a volcano is not an event which you and I here have to contemplate, because it may leave behind itself destruction, but it certainly doesn't leave behind a new quality of the human race. If I -- then ask myself and ask you: what is such a new quality of which we can say that at one time it hasn't existed?--the first that occurs is speech. It is obvious that the animals do not speak, in our sense. That is, they do not articulate. And they do not hear what they say.

Human speech, gentlemen, has one quality which is never mentioned in your textbooks of zoology. The difference between speech -- human speech and monkey speech is that we hear what we say. At least if we are intelligent. There are people who do not see what they say and they do not hear what they say, you see. These are the fools. And they are animals. That is, they -- they -- they do not know that speech is the great gift of becoming conscious ourselves of what we have said to others, and then say, "What I have said must be valid."

A man who speaks, gentlemen, is willing to put himself behind his words. And that's human speech. Nothing else is. If you say, "Don't quote me," you are a liar or a slanderer. Mostly a slanderer, or gossiping. Wie? If you say, "I don't" -- "Don't quote me," which most Dartmouth boys always hope to occur. A man who, however, speaks really is willing to be quoted for what he has said. And so he becomes a man of his word. And no animal can become the -- the animal of his word, of his speech.

So speech is a new quality in history. And we have then the -- one example of the -- and the first chapter of this course will then be devoted to the creation of speech. And there we had already run into a big hitch, because if such a quality is created, it means that at one time, it didn't exist. And therefore it then didn- -- doesn't belong to nature, because nature is everything that exists always. But if you have something that has not existed at one time, it makes no sense to say, "It belongs to nature," because it won't happen by itself. It -- happened at one time through an in- -- unpredictable event. It was a sudden surprise. When men began to speak, they looked back to their prehistoric, barbaric ancestors and said that they -- those were primitive men. Just as you look back to pre-Christian -- the pre-Christian world and think that they are uncivilized, as you so kindly say to them. It's very doubtful that this is true. But this we will not argue at this moment.

But I want to point out, gentlemen, that if you have new qualities at all--like speech--introduced into the history of the human race, you get three chapters for history. The prehistoric, where this quality of speech didn't exist. That would be the source-man, the caveman, the original man, the man before speech; we would call him the "prehistoric man"--then -- and for any such new quality, there would be a chapter which we could call its prehistory. It wouldn't just be for speech, you see. It would also be for all other new qualities of man. We had another chapter last time. That was called "writing," monument -- monumentalization, inscription, the leaving-behind of memories, of documents. This again would have a prehistory, the prehistory of writing. And then would come the event of writing, the happening, the coming-to-pass of writing. And then there would then be a third chapter for all these things, gentlemen, the chapter: how come -- how do we do it that this once-acquired faculty now can be inherited? You see, the inheritance of acquired faculties would then be the third chapter in the history of speech.

And, as I told you, I have to te- -- talk about the creation of speech, because speech is at a rapid rate vanishing from the scene in America. At this moment, your children -- you already know much less speech than people 60 years ago. And your children are threatened with the completely drying-up of the wells of speech. Because advertising, and sign language, you see, and televi-

sion -- all this kills language, kills speech. It's all noncommittal speech. It's all just patter. And people who only grow up with doggerels, gentlemen, and comic strips, miss out on speech. You cannot learn speech from comic strips. You can only learn speech from prayer, because prayer is the only situation in which a man puts himself behind his words. And comic strips are just written so that you -- may feel that it is absolutely without any risk. All the words there have absolutely no importance, you see, no danger, no risk.

So in this country, gentlemen, living speech is just not to be had. You can't find it. Instead, you find this juicy, mustard-like slang of time, or of -- or of The New Yorker. That you think is language, gentlemen. It's abuse of language. It's spicy language. And you remember that when a thing from flowery and fruity becomes spicy--you remember in Philosophy 9--it's already on the way to pu- -- putrefaction. It stinks. Time stinks. And The New Yorker stink, in my nostrils. In your, it is just stimulating and spicy. But the borderline is very, very precarious, gentlemen.

We had to give up reading The New Yorker, because we just can't have this kind of spicy language on -- in the long run. It just -- is -- is poi- -- is -- is -- is lethal, is fatal. It kills all our sensitivity.

So speech, gentlemen, is threatened. My course of course is a response to the threat -- to the public, to the civilization of our western world that it is on the way of losing all the qualities which are connected with living speech, with powerful speech, with creative speech. This is on the way out at this moment, by the impact of our strange industrial civilization. They call it "urban" in some courses with you. Or they call it with other names -- in others. All historians point out -- to this critical situation, you see, of our time. Behind it is all a withering, a drying-up of the wells of speech.

That will be the first chapter. And in this chapter, we will have then to distinguish--and thes -- these are the expressions which I want you to inherit from the first lecture, and to inherit for all the other lectures--are -- is the expression which I had to invent with a very bad conscience, because I hate to invent words--"single-aged" and "pluri-aged" quali- -- things have to be touched upon in this course.

I must now give you a simple example, gentlemen. In the last century, the liberals have not believed--your fathers, your grandparents, your great-grandparents, the people who lived since 1800 in this country--they have not believed that things are not for one generation, but for all generations, and therefore had to be treated differently. Everything was for the time being, everything -- and "time being" is a very good expression in this respect. It was single-aged, you see.

It was for individuals. It was rugged individualism. If you talk of a whole world organized for individuals, you abolish the difference between that moment in which a new quality is acquired, and the periods in which it has to be reacquired. Take Shakespeare and the time of Shakespeare, and take the fact that the Players today play Shakespeare. Obviously it takes qualities of loyalty, of reverence, and respect for us to reenact Shakespeare. We are people who are loyal to Shakespeare, you see, as far as we are. For Shakespeare, he had to be disloyal in order to write his new plays. He certainly threw away the old plays. There were plays in his days, you see, and he wrote new ones. Now the man who wrote -- does something for the first time, and creates the Shakespeare -- {play}, needs quite different qualities from the man who now enacts Shakespeare, you see. It's a different thing.

However, a new quality can only be acquired as long as you and I, gentlemen, are such contradictory animals, that we have both qualities: that we are able to appreciate new qualities, and that we are able to serve their restoration in every generation.

So we come to a strange contradiction, and the people--your forefathers, gentlemen, who came to this country in the 19th century--were not able to stomach this contradiction. They made no distinction between the man and the woman in us, between the son and the daughter. And they thought that everything had to be newness; everything had to be progress; everything had to be speeded up, and changed. And that was work. But obviously, gentlemen, if you make a great invention, a great discovery like speech, you have to find people who worship you for having invented speech, and do it, before they even have understood it. Because otherwise they can't learn it in due time. A baby, you see, must be made to learn to speak. It could never have invented speech. And the man who did create speech is an innovator. And the man who preserves speech is a conservative. And you and I, gentlemen, are therefore this queer bird, who at the same time must worship innovation and antiquity. And that's man. The historical being, gentlemen, is not the American who runs, runs, runs, runs as an escapist to some other hell to escape the draft. It is only the man who can begin something and who can continue something at the same time, which is a very strange quality. We all speak, after all, you see. But you're all expected to invent, perhaps, or to do something for the first time in your life.

Those who have been in my other courses know that I have tried to express it very simply by saying that you have to be an heir and an ancestor. You have to be an heir and an ancestor. And that's man. Any man who cannot be an ancestor, and any man who cannot be an heir is counted out of the human race. If -- if Jesus wa- -- had been only an innovator--as they call it now, a revolutionary--there are books: Jesus, the Revolutionary--He would be of no significance

for our race. Revolutionaries are as cheap as blackberries, gentlemen, and they are usually extinguished by the next revolutionary. Look at Mr. Stalin -- ups and s- -- downs because he was a revolutionary. That's not important for the human race. They are all forgotten. The mere revolutionaries. And the mere conservatives are all forgotten. I mean, Life with Father is very funny, you see. But it's just funny, because the father in this play is just funny, because he is not -- he is only an heir and not an ancestor.

We have to be both. And therefore, we have in ourselves, gentlemen, two qualities: one of our own age and of our own time, and one of belonging to the ages, which makes things terribly complicated, I'm afraid to say. And I invite you to drop your notion of your self, as though you were just a human being. It isn't so simple, gentlemen. If you were just a human being, you were just an insect. But you aren't. Since I can talk to you, I can awaken in you the terrible situation in which you really are, that through you, any acquired quality of the past can be destroyed.

And most of you do their utmost to destroy some of these important qualities right now, here in college, by abusing this college and all its institutions totally and constantly, as you well know. And you destroy it thereby. Don't think that you aren't found out. Or that is, you aren't found out individually, but Dartmouth gets a bad name. You know very well that any abuse of the rules for -- in the fraternities already -- always comes down on the other innocent men. Because one man has broken the rule, you see, everybody else has to suffer. That, everybody knows, after all. But it's much more serious, gentlemen. I said in -- last time to you that any Christian can abolish Christianity, because if he calls himself a Christian and is a scoundrel, it becomes a stench in the nostrils of all decent men to call himself a Christian. Well, what's { } a Christian, people say, "I have nothing to do with Christianity because of the terrible man who calls him- -- -selves Christian and are just scoundrels."

So gentlemen, any acquired quality can be destroyed and is destroyed in every generation by those who deny their obligation to develop this quality of restorer, of re-acquirer, of heir, you see, of a power that serves the continuity of the -- these past acquisitions. And that is much more common than you would think. Most of us, gentlemen, in some chapter of our existence, waste. We are all -- I, at least, have to admit, I am a great waster of the acquired fortunes of the human race. We all are negligent, of course. We don't keep alive institutions. How many formulas do you use? You say, "Excuse me," "Good morning," and they slur off, and after a certain time, they have lost their meaning, because we do not reacquire them, you see.

I told you the story of this Catholic woman who prided herself of being so

much a Catholic that she wouldn't grant her husband a divorce for 10 years; and just the same, when she went to church and the priest said to her, "Domine vobiscum," "the Lord may be" -- "be with you," she didn't know what he -- priest was saying. So she had gone there for 30 years and had never understood that the blessing of the Lord was invoked over her head. So she certainly does not reacquire the past. She does not transmit the acquired faculty. It rots through her. If enough Ca- -- Roman Catholics are so superstitious, then this wonderful prayer will lose all meaning, you see. And it will go to pot.

And so I think most Roman Catholics today are intelligent enough to understand that the Catholic Church has been saved by the Reformation, because just such a prayer was translated into the native tongue, and now it is -- even the Catholics begin to understand the text; and the Protestants have been a good competition. And the whole liturgical movement in the Catholic Church is an attempt to teach the laymen what they really pray.

That ha- -- says nothing, gentlemen, against the original prayer, "Domine vobiscum," you understand. This is a laudable and -- prayer which I pray myself. But it says something about the difficulty of the inheritance of acquired faculties. The pluri-aged quality, which this young woman would have had to have, you see, to reacquire the tradition of the Church, that is totally lacking in her. She reacts mechanically, but that's not the reacquisition which is needed in every age to make a thing meaningful and to keep it alive. It's killing it. It's just the other way around from what you think. Because you think, after all, she's a loyal Catholic, doesn't she keep Christianity ar- -- alive? No, she does not. This you must see. She does not, because she does not in any one moment, gentlemen, enter upon this event of a single age: at the times of Jesus, Christianity happens. That's the surprise; that's the new event. And then it has to be kept alive. Who keeps English alive in our time? Who keeps the speech, the first creation of mankind alive in our time? You and I? Hardly. But who does? Can you give me an example? Who is among the re-creators of speech at our -- in our age?

No, you give me a good example. You know everybody knows one or the other. On -- of whom would you think if you ask yourself: where is English today reborn so that it has the same vitality as in the days of its creation?

(A poet?)

Yes, Robert Frost, I would say, is one of the few men in our day and age who has kept English alive, you see. Wouldn't you agree?

So he is the vitalizer of this speech in our age. He hasn't invented speech, you see, but he has brought it to life. And that is the quality of service, gentle-

men, which you and I learn from the poet. And by reading and buying his book, we do the best we can to participate in this re-creation. That's why a poet must be heard. That's why a poet must be popular. That's why you have to worship a poet, and you must per- -- pay him a little better salaries than you do at this moment in this country. You do not support the artist in this country. You despise him because he's not a money-maker. But gentlemen, the condition for an artist is that he does not -- is not interested in making money, but in reacquiring lost qualities of the human race. And of course, he's hated by all these people, like this lady in church, who think that these qualities do not need to be reacquired. In this country unfortunately, these people -- these despisers of the -- reacquisition form the majority. And you despise a person because he is Ezra Pound, or he is Robert Frost; that doesn't bring in any money. That's a --. But gentlemen, the poet serves you, and he serves your children. He doesn't serve himself. He's better than you. You serve yourself, gentlemen, which is a hard thing to do, and very unhealthy. But he serves you, and he serves this quality of the human race that we can speak.

If you would see this, gentlemen, you would, as in old Ireland, you would -- worship the art -- poets. In Ireland, as you know, the poets were the judges. You had to be a poet before you could be appointed a judge. Because the Irish felt that a judge had to -- tell the truth. And he had to say -- tell the truth poignantly. And he had to say it deeply, and so they said, "The only man in our age who still handles language profoundly is the poet." So the poet is the judge, you see.

This is much nearer to the truth, gentlemen, than your behavior, where you take a shyster lawyer in New York, and then he can serve up through the political party and become a judge. And then you get here judges who take bribes. The poet will not take bribes, because he's just not interested in money. He's in love with language.

Now here in this college you can see how we deal with the pluri-aged problems of this inheritance of acquired faculties. We have a college in which English is taught. You can even major in English. It's usually minor, but you call it "major." It's an institution, gentlemen, which comes after the event. To keep an event in business, to keep it going -- a school is such event -- such an event, in institutionalized form.

And we have now three chapters for every great event in the human race -- every new quality. Prehistory, nature without the quality; the historical event, you see; and the institution by which we try to keep this event going, and bring it to everybody in the community, time after time. Age after age.

So human history, gentlemen, consists of three absolutely different strata. The natural man without the quality. The hero who creates the quality, and the institution that preserves the quality. Now the funny thing is, gentlemen, that in your picture of the world, all these three real men of -- in history, or women, do not exist. You have a kind of average individual, everybody beginning from scratch, everybody be- -- being -- being just a natural animal. This isn't so, gentlemen, because the prehistorical being in us, the man who did not yet have the Church, or have the state, or have Christianity, or have speech, or have literature, was yearning for it. The prehistorical man is yearning for what's to come. He is very unnatural, because he's not satisfied with his nature. You are all very satisfied with your nature. That's why you are so dehumanized, and so decadent. A man who is satisfied with his nature, gentlemen, has ceased to be a human being, because the first quality of a human being -- his nature is that he yearns for something better. If you don't, gentlemen, you have ceased to belong to history. And the idea that you can be happy, gentlemen, is the opposite from the pursuit of happiness. As long as you pursue it, you still are yearning for something better. But if you are happy, gentlemen, then you are in hell.

And you confuse the two today, totally. You think that a -- schoolchild has to be happy. Where is it written that you have to happy in college? Be unhappy; then you can -- something can become of you. But you resent it, and you write home that you are very unhappy. Well, be unhappy. Utterly uninteresting to everybody. And it should be uninteresting to yourself, too. But instead, you center around this, and say because you are unhappy, you are insecure, so they create Social Security, and on it goes.

Gentlemen -- well, it's ridiculous, gentlemen. You are not natural beings. You are imitators of the pre-caveman, because you want to find happiness in this prehistorical state before you acquire a new faculty. Prehistorical man, gentlemen, was yearning. The nations have waited for the coming of Christ, have they not? The prophets have announced His coming, but you want to be back in antiquity, like natural man, without the yearning.

So the prehistorical quality is -- has disappeared in you. The heroic quality, you laugh at. "I'm not a hero," you say. Heroes -- that's ironical, you see. You give -- you know all these debunking books of -- of the First World War. Farewell to Arms, and -- and what-not, you see. "Oh, we have been mistaken. We have been abused, you see. They have made us into heroes, and we didn't want to be."

So gentlemen, the second quality has been abolished, and the third quality of course has been abolished, because the institutions have lost their spirit; and they leave you alone; and we have mechanical examinations, which is just an expression for the fact that Dartmouth has lost its spirit. Any automatism in

an institution ceases to -- to hand over a newly acquired faculty. Because what's needed, gentlemen--when you want to go pluri-aged into history, with a new quality like speech--is obviously that the next generation and the next gets excited as the first over this quality, you see. If you cannot get excited over Robert Frost's poetry, then English dies.

So the excitement, you see, dismisses from Dartmouth College the enthusiasm, you see, and the thing cannot work. And we get the speech- -- the writing clinic. And every term I have to send more and more of the -- you to this writing clinic, obviously. You -- there is no enthusiasm. It's very easy to write well if you are enthusiastic. But it is impossible to learn English without enthusiasm. And that's what you try to do. Yes, you too, { }. You have tried to get by. No hard work.

So gentlemen, I feel at this moment I have a right to appeal to you to look into the matter of prehistoric, of heroic, and of institutional man, because I think you do not quite see the -- the structure. It's a very profound structure which made God create a man who is both sexes and both generations, who can be an heir and an ancestor, who can be a virgin soul and a paternal man -- character, who has tremendous -- a tremendous variety, because he has to keep in himself awake the natural background of the -- man before history sets in. The power to create events which bring in new qualities, and the power to retain, and to inherit, and to transmit these once-created qualities. And I have coined these words, which I hope I shall repeat as often as is possible, whenever it is necessary--"single-aged" and "pluri-aged"--to wake you up to the fact that you no longer understand the terms "nature" and the term "history." Both have lost their meaning, and I cannot use them without constant drawing attention to the fact that you both -- they both have -- are rotting today.

I'll give you a -- an argument, a demonstration of this, by the fact that your ancestors, when they were asked why they were Christians, would answer, "Because it is an historical religion," because all other religions are mythical or philosophical. But Christianity has happened in history. Christ went to the Cross, and that was the meaning of the word "historical." To you, however, historical religion is something old. It's something that involved bygone times, is it not? And if I say today, "Christianity is an historical religion," that's not a recommendation. That's not an argument for its truth in your ears. It just makes it so much more boring, and so much more unreal. Because to you, history is the past.

Now I have tried to wake you up to the fact that the past is prehistory. That the heroic man is the same as the hero--like Lincoln--who belongs to the ages, who's always with us. They have never died. And they are more alive than

you, gentlemen. And you are prehistoric man who wants to come to life at this moment. And you have to invoke these heroes, if you ever shall succeed. You are not yet in history. You are in prehistory. That's so important for you to grasp, that a college student is before history. You aren't yet -- haven't any history. You may never enter it. -- Certainly you make every effort to miss out on it. You are prehistoric beings. And you are even frightened by the threat that you -- we might drag you out into history. That's why you dodge the draft. Because otherwise that would be a good occasion for you to become real -- real people. A veteran is an historical person. You are not.

And the third thing, gentlemen, the institution, needs a service, and an incorporation, and an embodiment, and an identification by all of us, you see, which today you perhaps find in one -- in one class of man only. That -- are the doctors. In medicine, you have the institution of medicine. And you have the oath in Hippocrates, and most people in this country still understand that a doctor is, you see, a professional man who is different from a man who has no profession, you see. Most of you are job-hunters, and jobholders, and jobbers; and he is a professional man, and there is a large difference between --. Because you are not made by your job; the job is -- has not the power to make you. But a -- the doctor belongs to the medical profession, you see. And there is a code of behavior by the institution of medicine. And he keeps alive a tradition, you see, that goes down from 2,000 years now through the ages. And you can be enthusiastic doctor, or you can't be a doctor. You can't be a doctor without enthusiasm. Certainly not a good doctor.

And this enthusiasm, gentlemen, of medicine, is perhaps the nearest I can come to you to show you that most of you don't have this entering into history, because you do not enter a profession, and you have no heroes like Hippocrates. And you take no oath, you see. And you can't take an oath, because otherwise you would have to break it. A man cannot be loyal to the Coca-Cola Company and the next day to the Pepsi-Cola Company. That's asking too much.

Gentlemen, the greatest example, and the simplest example of this dis- -- distinction between single-aged and pluri-aged, between hero and institution, is of course the story of Jesus of Nazareth and the Church. Jesus of Nazareth, being superior to all of us, saw that man did not understand the way in which a new quality became flesh. And so He gave us a lesson in what is called "incarnation." You could also call it "in-" -- "embodiment." And He divided His life into two halves. In the first half, He was the hero; and He was -- for the first time -- He led the good life for the first time. And in the second half, the Apostles in His stead embodied His life as an institution that could reach everybody every day, ever since. And in this division of His life into two halves, He has marked out for you and me this problem of prehistory--before the coming of Christ, as we still count;

the coming of Christ; and then the institution, the recurrence. But that's valid for any other thing, too. He has only set the example how anything that is -- has not existed before, gentlemen--in this case, Christian freedom--how it can be made perpetual and permanent, you see. People have to have yearned for it, and the ancient nations yearned for the coming of Christ. Then somebody has to do it, to live it, to enact it, at the cost of his life, or at whatever cost. And then people have to take it up, and carry it around and say, "This is it," in every generation.

You know, gentlemen, this then has un- -- induced me--it also has to do with the last lecture, Sir. What time is it, please?

(Quarter after 2.)

Wie?

Fifteen after 2. That's a good opportunity for having a break. Open those doors and windows, will you? And disappear out into the hallway. In 10 minutes, we...

[tape interruption]

I now have to sum it up, gentlemen. The title of the first lecture, I said, would be correctly stated--negatively, however--as "False Eternity." False eternity. Of course, we have now learned, gentlemen, that only this can be called -- can be eternal that has entered the scene--like the creation of the sun and the moon in the Bible--at one time in the scene of history. And then has persevered by the efforts of every generation again -- to come to life again. Speech in this sense is the -- can convey to you the true meaning of the term "eternity." "Eternity" means something that goes on from generation to generation. That's all it means. And it has today an absolutely wrong ing -- ring in our ears, because of the schools of philosophy, who in their impotency to deal with history and only willing to deal with nature, could not see anything, you see, except the -- moment; and eternity, that is, that -- for always. If you deal with nature -- matter, you can say, "Matter is the same always." But if you deal with any creative process, you have always this problem that at one time it did not exist, and from then on it does exist. And this is the official meaning, gentlemen, of the term "eternal" in the Bible. You all misread the Bible, {to death}. We will come to this later when we deal with these things -- this point. But today it's already important to know, gentlemen, that we have only to do in human history, and in any humanity -- problem of man...

[tape interruption]

...seen at one time in one age, and then are found either deficient in grace

and are eliminated and forgotten, or are found worthy of being carried on forever, you see. And then they put -- pose this question of being eternalized, of being recognized as something that, after it has once happened, must now come back and be made recurrent. The Russians call this revolution, you see, the "perpetual revolution." It's just another expression for this problem of perpetuity. But the connection between "first" and "always" is today lost on you. You do not believe in the meaning of the word "once forever," you see. But you marry, you see -- you should try to marry once forever. Isn't that true, you see? The wedding day is -- signs you up for a unique event for your -- in your own age, but it's -- also signs you up for the permanency of the family which you are going to found. And you do hope that your grandchildren still will remember their grandfather forever. If you can, you want to go down in history, as the founder of this family. And there is no end to the generations whom you hope shall remember this event. Or you are not a good marryer, you are not a good founder of a family, you better had not marry. If you have -- don't have the power in your loins, gentlemen, to see the future generations, and generations, and generations, remember this wedding day with great pleasure, and with great honor, and with great respect, you are less fit for marriage.

Now we made last time a simple distinction; and I must ask you to follow me in this once more, and that will give us a table of contents for the course, and that's how -- as far as I want to come today. Once more, what time is it now?

({ }.)

That -- what makes it nearly impossible for you to understand history is that you lump it together with the past and with the term "nature." And therefore, I want to wake you up to the fact that I am not speaking of the past, and I'm not speaking of nature in any -- any -- anything that I have to mention in this course. I'm speaking exclusively of the future. I'm speaking of the future, because it is obvious, gentlemen, that speech is a quality without which you and I cannot reach the future. And therefore, I am interested in the beginning of your and my future through the invention of creation of speech. And I therefore take "creation" to mean the beginning of that process of which you and I at this moment are a part. The creation of speech is only that aspect of speech, you see, by which you and I can say, "The man who created speech is me, because I must carry this on, now."

Therefore the word "nature" and the word "creation" are as different as can be. And you -- they are confused today in your -- slang. You think that when the Bible deals with creation of the world, it has to do with natural things. It of course, hasn't. The -- people in the Bible are just like you and me, gentlemen. They experience life; they experience love; they experience the falling in love;

they experience great decisions of entering the army as a volunteer in the -- World War II; and therefore they said, "All great events have happened in the same way. Even sun and moon must have been created by a word by which it was said, 'Let there now be the sun.'" And the whole Bible is a projection of human experience into the past. And therefore I believe that it is true, because I believe my own experience more than all natural scientists and their mesmerism, or Geigerism, or whatever they call these funny instruments. I know how new things are created. I have come to this country one day by a decision. I have married. I have children. I have written books. I am the author of highly original acts and books. And therefore I suppose that all men act, when they do something original, in the same manner. And I think it is ridiculous that people who have never done anything but look from the outside at the stars or at the moon will tell us how they came to pass. Have they created anything? They have not, these natural scientists. They have -- it's all hindsight.

Therefore, gentlemen, there are always two ways of looking at the world. You can look at the things that -- around us as the beginning of your future. And then you won't abuse them. And you will treat a forest as a part of your own future, and you won't cut it down. Today this is wrongly called "conservation," gentlemen. Something quite different. It's your identity with the creatures that already exist, you see, and of which you are now the leader. And you take them into glorious future. And that's creation. And of course, the Bi- -- Bible is radical. It says, "From the very first beginning, the future of mankind was God's purpose; and therefore He foresaw that He would need land, and water, and sunlight. How otherwise could we be," you see? And He had to give us these opportunities before He could create us, { } in the middle of the garden of Eden. Gentlemen, we all live that way, by the way. Everybody believes in the Bible as a practical matter, even if he scorns it and says it's unscientific. Fortunately it is unscientific, gentlemen! You would be lost, you would have no future if everything was scientific, because there would be no future at all. But you and I, gentlemen, are in this wonderful situation in which you can say that at this moment, creation is in process.

And there is a famous song that -- it was even written in Maine--and I never thought there could come such a good song from Maine--and it runs, "Creation's Lord, We Give You Thanks that We Are in the Making, Still." Who knows this hymn? Well, it was only composed and written in 1905, so you see even the 20th century has its poets. The man even was a college president. So -- he may go to Heaven for this. Nobody has ever heard of it -- this hymn?

What I am driving at is, gentlemen: that you must make a total break in your imagination between nature and creature. A creature is that in us which waits to be completed. The nature is that in us which -- was already completed

before we can do anything about it. You see, nature is that part of me which is as it is. And the creature in you and me is that which is not what it is. And therefore you have to handle everything that is on hand as mere opportunity, as mere promise for fulfillment. But what has to be fulfilled is not to be seen from the promise or from the nature of things, gentlemen. You just have to think of Helen Keller or of Prometheus to know that -- the -- the nature of a thing never has anything to do with its fulfillment, you see. Moses was a stammerer, and that's why he became the founder of the children of Israel, you see. And you would, of course, tell a stammerer that he couldn't be elected to the Senate or the Congress, because he has to speak fluently. It's no good reason to say this, you see. You never can know what the promise means before it is taken up by the man, the hero of the play, the human play, you see, who responds in his age to do something that shall last.

So creation--please put this -- put in -- put in your notes a kind of -- of line, from beginning to the end of human history. And put the word "nature" at its beginning, and the word "creation" at its end. Man shall be created when the story is over. We aren't, yet. We are in the middle of it. And the steps from nature to creation lead from nature to prehistory--that is, to the waking-up of man that he is incomplete to his yearning; then to the historical event by which this new solution enters the scene; and then to the institution by which this, what has begun to exist, is carried into the future, so that the whole thing is not done in vain, that it can now be part and parcel of your equipment, because otherwise you cannot go on adding to this creation. Obviously, gentlemen, you can't -- couldn't invent today the atom bomb and the hydrogen bomb if you hadn't first learned English; and then learned science, you see; and then lived in a civilized state with copyright, and patent right, and law. All these things, and all these qualities are necessary for anything you want to undertake now. So they are part and parcel of your future.

And you are all so uninteresting to history and to God--your maker, gentlemen--because you have defied Him. You have denied that you are His creation. You say you are His nature. God has nothing to do with nature, gentlemen. In God's eyes, nature does not exist. Nature is an abstraction of the human mind. God only knows creatures -- that is, He knows of the fact that He is in the midst of creation. He's not doing anything for the last millions of years, but creating, you see. And what He is creating, we do not yet know. Because you himself are in the crucible. You are His creature. And at your death, we will know if He has -- if you have been a freak, or some no- -- type that has to go on through the ages.

At this moment, gentlemen, you and I -- we are all single-aged creatures. And any one of us can only hope that a little bit of him will enter and belong to

the ages. If you have acted right--as a family man, or as a lawyer, or as a businessman--something of you will go into the ages, and will belong to other generations.

I had an argument with one of you--who was the gentleman?--in the -- in the interlude. And he said to me that -- we took the case of Lincoln. When Lincoln died, his secretary of war said in the morning of the -- April 10th, "Now he belongs to the ages." And that is, of course, a good starting point for understanding what a single-aged and a pluri-aged fact in reality is. Lincoln had to live devotedly in his own age. The people in Har- -- Dartmouth and in -- in Harvard despised him for his vulgarity and his off-color stories. And when he died, there was a sudden shakeup in the country. And even the people in Harvard and Dartmouth recognized that a great man had died. Not before. Oh, not before. Because he be- -- now belonged to the ages. And before, he had been only of his own age. That is the simplest formula, gentlemen, which I can offer you, to explain that many things --for example, the off-color stories of Mr. Lincoln, and his obstipation, and his insane wife--belong to his age and time. And they are forgotten, you see. Or they don't matter. Or perhaps they make him -- they make us more painful, his achievement. But what remains, you see, that he kept the Union, and he kept Chris- -- America in the Christian faith, despite the South. All America is still a Christian country after Lincoln, which is not an easy thing, gentlemen, in a war fought about -- on slavery between two -- cousins and brothers. That belongs to the ages. And when this country was in great distress in 1940, there was one play written after another which brought back Abe Lincoln in Illinois. You may have -- seen some of these plays, have you not?

Gentlemen, I now introduce you to an expression which we will use time and again to show you the relation between single-aged and pluri-aged. The problem of the institution, by which a new quality of the human race is eternalized, is its re-evocation. It has to be invoked and evoked time and again in order to exist. You have to learn the name "Lincoln," although this is not in the nature of things. By nature, he would by now be forgotten. But we have to evoke him, by a special, you see, process--constantly--because otherwise he would -- we would not know of him.

And so I made the distinction last time between the eruption of a volcano, the lava of which is lying there for the next 2,000 years around the mountain, you see. But the children do not have to tremble. They may climb this mountain, you see, because the lava -- the lava has cooled off. And what does it matter that there was an eruption and their grandparents were killed? Children do not mourn grandparents, you see; they're children. Such an event is not an historical event. Such an event is not an institutionalized event. But the re-evocation of the name of Abraham Lincoln makes you into Americans. And if the day should

come where, on February 12th nobody would know that this is George Washington's birthday--it happens to be today--and 10 days from now, that this happens to be Lincoln's birthday, then you would have ceased to be American, you see. Nothing would help you. The law wouldn't help you, you see. The coins wouldn't help you. The flag wouldn't help you. You would have ceased to be Americans, because the two founders of this country, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, wou- -- would not be re-evoked in your generation, you see, as the founders of the unit to which you belong. And nothing else could take its place, because they are the founding fathers. The Union has been founded twice: one time in 1776, and the other time in 1865.

Therefore gentlemen, we need this word "evocation." The hero has to be re-evoked. That's why we play Shakespeare in this college, year after year, you see, because the creation of the English stage has to be re-evoked in you and me. Now the difference is, gentlemen: things re-evoked are things that the child does not know by nature. It took you 20 years to come to Dartmouth College. Therefore it's only now that we can appeal to you and to make you feel the importance of a name like Lincoln. You may have heard of him before, but it was a play thing. And as long as we allow Mr. Ford to call his car, "Lincoln car," it's in great danger of being talked down, you see. The dan- -- abuse of -- of -- of "Lincoln" for commodities, is of course a cert- -- sure way of ruining his reputation.

You know we found this so deeply that the flag no longer can be used for commercial purposes in this country, you see. Because otherwise the Star-Spangled Banner would very be -- soon be -- be used for toilet paper.

Now the table of contents then, gentlemen, of this course is directed towards the future. What's the luggage, what's the baggage which we have to carry into the future? The selective proce- -- principle of this course is the question: what has to last, what has to be re-evoked in order to allow you and me to live as we must live? And we have then very simple principles of selection. The universal history, gentlemen, of the qualities that must be inherited -- this universal history is a very limited history. It has not to expand on all civilizations, and all wars, and all kings, and all priests, and all religions. But we will have to hew the line; that's -- the first chapter is the creation of speech. The second chapter is the creation of writing. The third chapter, gentlemen, is the evocation of the quality by which you can reach the future as a founder. It's called in general terms, "fatherhood," the creation of fatherhood. But it means simply that there can be no history, there can be no common enterprise of mankind, if you have not the faculty in you, you see, to hand som- -- transmit something to the future. That had to be, so to speak, put on a special pedestal. And then in the process, gentlemen, of going forward, things, as you know, of yourself, like speech and writing, become so natural that you need the poet and you need the

scientist to bring them back to their prehistoric origin, to make them original again, to make them feel -- make them feel how the world looks without it. And so the poet and the artist, and the scientist, had to be created as special professions. And the fourth chapter then of this enterprise will be called the creation of the arts and sciences. I have not written in front of this the word "creation," but you can. It means, Chapter First is Creation of Speech; Chapter 2, the Creation of Writing; Chapter 3, the Creation of Fatherhood; and Chapter 4, the Creation of the Arts and Sciences.

Now you may perhaps see immediately--you take these four points: nature, prehistory, hero, and institution--that these four chapters probably have something to do with these four things. The state of nature is re-created into you and me by the arts and sciences in every generation, you see. You go to Wagner. Who has heard Wagner's "Ring"? It's -- you remember there the -- the magic of the fire charm, you see? That gives you the feeling of what peo- -- fire meant to the first man, when fire was first put to human use, you see. You and I, by striking a match, are now totally indifferent to the existence of fire, you see. Wagner in his composition tries to re-evoke the magic power, you see, of fire, before man created it, you see, and at the moment that it was created, you see. So in him, fire is in its prehistoric, you see, situation. On the way from nature without -- human nature without using -- use of fire, you see, and the step into this first pacing fire, and its incalculable fire. You aren't quite sure when you -- if you -- The Valkyrie, you see, the Siegfried -- Brnnhilde is put by Wotan in the midst of this fire, waiting for her redemption, waiting for her emancipation by Siegfried. That's -- isn't it, ja?

(Yes.)

And so you are there taken back to a moment when man is not master of the fire, but fire is master of man, wouldn't you say? And that's perhaps the best description, gentlemen, of nature. Real nature means that man has lost its mastery o- -- of it, you see, and is realizing the tremendous power that nature has. If you make yourself a part of nature, nature is all-powerful, you see. And we are, as the people like to say today, this grain of dust on the surface of the globe, which allegedly Mr. Galilei and Mr. Copernicus has -- have discussed, that we are. But we have been this all the time, you see; but the discovery that we are a part of the planetary system has made us re-aware of this first fact of our little existence. The same is done with the composition -- the music of Wagner. The arts and sciences take us back to the moment in which man is not yet the hero, has not yet acted upon the scene of -- of nature, you see. Before his own time, so to speak, the arts and sciences take us.

Now if this is so, gentlemen, then it is very strange that this re-awakening

of the state of nature comes so late. It's only the fourth chapter of creation. I want to give you now the terms by which you will see that this re-evocation of the natural man really comes at the end of the story in which we were created.

When man spoke, he was terribly busy to get away from nature. When man wrote, he was terribly aware -- to get away from the seasons and the change of -- changes in nature, you see, or the -- a monument, you see, is there forever. Take a pyramid. They are now there for 4,000 years. It's a very good example of a monument, you see, in writing. They are also inscribed, as you know, with all kinds of things.

So we shall say, gentlemen, that the era of speech is certainly a step out of nature. It is the great desire of reaching the future. Men speak, gentlemen, to throw themselves into the future. The first people who spoke, gentlemen, were the people of whom we only have their graves, because they are so expensive. And they have reached the future. You and I know of these primitive men only through their graves. And the only thing they have done with lasting success was that they now rate as the beginners of your and my existence, for this very reason.

You probably all know Mr. {Childe's} books on -- on primitive man, do you? Who -- who does? He is a best-seller. But he has never been able to -- {Childe}, the Englishman. No? Is he not read -- anymore? I don't mean our Professor {Childs}, here. { }. The great thing about the people who invented speech is, gentlemen, that we still speak their language. I said this in the first place; I have to repeat { }. Next time of course I hope to come -- no, not next time, but we'll talk about their creation some more.

The same is true about the monument builders, the palace builders, the city builders, the country builders. The second chapter are the -- of the monumentalists. They certainly wanted to master -- to victi- -- vanquish nature.

I'll give the -- to the first chapter the simple -- title, "The Tribes." Languages originally were spoken by the tribesmen. And the tribesman is a -- an animal who can speak. And that's the only inherited quality, so to speak, of a tribesman to this day. If you ask what is a red Indian in this country, the -- he has his own language. The Navajo Indian speak Navajo Indian. And they are Navajo Indians ho- -- whether you put them in one reservation or the other, you see; in a canyon or in a wood. Or in a -- they --. The speech makes the Navajo Indian.

If you go, however, to Mr. Nasser, to the Egyptian country, with the -- to the Nile Valley with its pyramids, you will find that these people do not migrate like the Indians, like the tribes. No Indian leaves his country. And to this day,

you find no Egyptians in this country, to speak of. They are few, but there is no immigration into this country, as you have from Syria, or as you have from Turkey, or from Greece. Because they belong to the country. The country is their monument. They have to drink Nile water. We'll talk about this at great length.

But I want to tell you only that what I call the second chapter of monument builders, we shall call "the empires," meaning by "empires" some part of the globe defined and cut out where the tribes are roaming all over the earth, identified by their speech, the empire dwellers are identified by their buildings, by their place. Rome is Rome, you see. There's nowhere but Rome. And that's an empire. The em- -- Rome of the Caesars. You can see that there the place is giving the character and the name to the entity. But an Indian is an Indian wherever he is. You see the difference? An Indian is characterized by his speech. But a country is characterized by its location on the map. You cannot transplant Albania, not even to Lynn, Massachusetts. There are 10,000 Albanese in Lynn, Massachusetts, you know. But it doesn't help them. They are not in Albania. Any doubt left? Wie?

There are then two principles, gentlemen, of organizing humanity, you see. One by place or space, you see; and one by speech. That's not the whole story. But that's -- are two principles. Can you see this?

Now the last two groups, of course, are very simple. The fatherhood of God and of man who was created by the Israelites, and the arts and the sciences are the creation of the Greeks. And so the -- the first history of the human race consists of four chapters, gentlemen: of the principle of speech spoken in the tribes, of the principle of locality and of place developed in empires, and by the principle of the fatherhood of God developed by the Jews, and the principle of the re-evocation of our natural -- and the genius and endowment developed by the arts and sciences of Greece. That's why we are here in a Greek college. But if we were on- -- we don't call us "Greeks," because there is a second story. The Greeks were Greeks; the Jews were Jews; the Egyptians were Egyptians; and the tribes were tribes. We are not. We are all four. We are mixed up. Or at least mixed. You are mixed up. I'm mixed.

That is, gentlemen, since the coming of Christ, in our era, we are endowed with the power of all these four influences, of all these four str- -- four streams of life. And so our own era has to be added as Chapter 5, 6, and 7 in which we shall show how more and more of the qualities of Greece, of Israel, of Jerusalem and Athens; and of the tribesmen, and their dances and magic, and hunting; and of the astronomy, and pyramids, and temples of the Egyptians have entered your and my life as available. We make use of these qualities much more freely than a man in antiquity. You just have to read of the new Dead Sea Scrolls. Has it ever

dawned on you that what the real greatness of this discovery is, I {feel} they all quibble about the -- what they have to say about these Dead Sea Scrolls. What I realize--and I think you sh- -- can, too--is that here were men, 900 years after the reign of David, still being willing to live in a desert to copy after 900 years, without any fault every word that was written in his time in the books of Samuel and the Book of Kings. No mistake. Genesis, everything else. They went on another thousand years before the invention of printing, as you know. We have manuscripts, the older manu- -- the former manuscripts we only had were of 1100 of our era. It is this faithfulness, gentlemen, of the inheritance of acquired faculties which has made the Jews the Jews. They are -- wouldn't be interesting if they had a prophet Isaiah or King David at one time. Many a country has had this, you see. They are interesting only because they inherited this tradition and kept it alive, witnessing to the fatherhood of God. That's the only quality which makes the Jews so -- Jews so -- such an interesting nation. Such a unique nation. No other nation has kept its records straight. And the Dead Sea Scrolls show us how it was done. It's a perfect negation of their own age, and their own time. They were only saving, you see, the heroic age from oblivion. And I certainly cannot imagine myself being such a faithful servant to such a 2,000-year-long tradition. And you can't. You want to have your own life, gentlemen. You couldn't imagine that you would sit there at the Dead Sea and copy every iota. They had to wash their hands, as you -- we know there from the find, whenever they wrote the name of God -- now you know the name of God occurs quite often in the manuscripts of the Bible. And so you can imagine how often they had to wash their hands. And they don't -- he has -- seem to have skipped it, ever. At least, we don't know. I'm sure there were some rascals who did, but --.

This is what fills me with admiration, gentlemen. And this you should begin to learn to admire in history, because nothing is important that you are not willing to repeat yourself through your whole life and to give to your children. What -- does prayer mean, gentlemen, if your wife is not able to teach her child to pray? If she doesn't, religion is bunk. If she does, then you have discovered why fatherhood is a quality which has to be carried on to the last days of creation, gentlemen, why you desert your child if you do not pray. Because you omit the anticipation of this child that one day it has to become a father, and a father cannot be -- act if he does not forbid and say -- says "No" to his son in a dangerous moment. If you haven't learned from your father that you must not steal, and you must not murder, and you must not lie, God help you. And most people in this country have no fathers who want to say "No," and therefore fatherhood at this moment is disappearing fast, and -- just like speech. And it is a ridiculous country, gentlemen, in this respect, because you have woman schoolteachers, and no fathers. And so you may still learn how to spell, gentlemen, but you certainly do not know what the law is. And what it means to say "no" to some urge which you have, and to -- for example, to exploit not the -- not the coun- -- soil of

this country. Only if you have respect for your children, if you want to be their father, will you forgo the temptation of cutting down all the redwood in California. Be- -- can you -- you can make a lot of money out of redwood at this moment, as you well know. But fortunately Mr. Theodore Roosevelt 40 years ago -- 50 years ago woke up to this fact that the -- that the Weyerhauser family was ruining the West Coast. And so we have conservation. And that is a quality, gentlemen, by which a man becomes a father, because he forgoes in his own generation certain rights, and he thinks of the future.

Thank you.

Have I done better this time, with your machine?