its compass, and the various quarters which the wind may blow from, in that elevated sphere of Being. Our imagination at the same time involuntarily acquires a perspective. We see too many serious interests at work here to enjoy naively our own original one-sidedness.
And with the ever-growing vastness of what there is to be known, and the awful specialty now required of the knower, it appears more and more as if the only superiority which the so-called “liberally” educated man can have over others, is just the possession of this background, which narrowly educated men have perforce to go without. Through it the “liberal” mind is kept in contact with the general probabilities of things, and gains that golden quality of reasonableness which ought to be the ripest fruit of education.
It is, now, as part of our own general background that we non-Germanic members of the Faculties so gladly greet the Germanic Museum. Although collectively we may possibly be as wondrously learned as the outside public supposes us, what is really perhaps the most wondrous thing about us is the encyclopaedic character of our ignorance,—when we are taken singly. Our excuse is that no one can afford to revel in such depths of ignorance as a “professor”—he has his background, and can go to it for information, and there is always some colleague alongside of him to extricate him from a mistake. The ignorance of the German past, for instance, with which most of those for whom I modestly speak are afflicted, would, I am sure, if it could be revealed to the gentlemen who have just addressed us, appear almost inconceivable in its profundity. We are not Teutomaniacs, not archaeologists, not Kunsthistoriker, not even artistic in our tastes. Yet we heartily and sincerely welcome this collection, each of us on his own account and ignorant as we are, because of its immediate and palpable effect upon our background. No one of us can enter into the presence of those snow-white images across the Delta, or look upon those fine photographs of German architectural work, without feeling something within him instantaneously making response in a way that builds out and interprets better his consciousness of what we already were before we had this gift.
