Excerpt from Goethe and Carlyle: An Inaugural Address Delivered to the Society by the President

I believe it was the same awakening spirit of human sympathy which Goethe preached, the same reverence for a past that was no more, the same faith in a future that was not yet, which led the great historical nations of the world to lay the first foundations of what we now call literature, and what to them was world-literature, so far as they could realize it. When we look at the Egyptian monuments, ornamented with their beautiful hieroglyphic inscriptions, when we examine the palaces of Babylon and Nineveh, as it were embroidered with cuneiform writing, we may recognize even there the rudiments of a world-literature. Those ancient Egyptian and Babylonian scribes were thinking, not of their own time and their own country only, when busily engraving their primitive archives they were thinking of us. They believed in a future of the human race, and, call it weakness or strength, they wished to be remembered by those who should come after them.

Such a belief in posterity marks indeed a new period in the growth of the human mind, it heralds the dawn of a new life. At first man lives for the present only, from day to day, from year to year. The first real step in advance is a regard for the past, so far as he knows it, a worship of his ancestors, a belief in their continued existence, nay, even in their power to reward and to punish him. After that belief in a distant past follows a belief in a distant future, and from these two combined beliefs springs the first feeling of humanity in our hearts, the conviction that we are by indissolublebonds connected with those that came before us and those who will come after us, that we form one universal family on earth. As these feelings 'grow up slowly and gradually in our own heart, so they required long periods of growth in the history of the world, but among the most favoured races they asserted their powerful influence at a very early time.

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