The Egyptians, who preserved their past in memorials of stone and hieroglyph so purposefully that we, four thousand years after them, can determine the order of their kings’ reigns, so thoroughly eternalized their bodies that today the great Pharaohs lie in our museums, recognizable in every lineament, a symbol of grim triumph—while of Dorian kings not even the names have survived. For our own part, we know the exact birthdays and deathdays of almost every great man since Dante, and, moreover, we see nothing strange in the fact. Yet in the time of Aristotle, the very zenith of Classical education, it was no longer known with certainty if Leucippus, the founder of Atomism and a contemporary of Pericles—i.e., hardly a century before—had ever existed at all; much as though for us the existence of Giordano Bruno was a matter of doubt[141] and the Renaissance had become pure saga. And these museums themselves, in which we assemble everything that is left of the corporeally-sensible past! Are not they a symbol of the highest rank? Are they not intended to conserve in mummy the entire “body” of cultural development? As we collect countless data in milliards of printed books, do we not also collect _all_ the works of _all_ the dead Cultures in these myriad halls of West-European cities, in the mass of the collection depriving each individual piece of that instant of actualized purpose that is its own—the one property that the Classical soul would have respected—and _ipso facto_ dissolving it into our unending and unresting Time? Consider what it was that the Hellenes named Μουσεῖον;[142] how deep a significance lies in the change of sense! ----- Footnote 127: See Vol. II, pp. 360 et seq. Footnote 128: Diels, _Antike Technik_ (1920), p. 159. Footnote 129: About 400 B.C. savants began to construct crude sun-dials in Africa and Ionia, and from Plato’s time still more primitive clepsydræ came into use; but in both forms, the Greek clock was a mere imitation of the far superior models of the older East, and it had not the slightest connexion with the Greek life-feeling. See Diels, _op. cit._, pp. 160 et seq. Footnote 130: Horace’s _monumentum ære perennius_ (Odes III, 30) may seem to conflict with this: but let the reader reconsider the whole of that ode in the light of the present argument, and turn also to Leuconoe and her “Babylonian” impieties (Odes I, 11) _inter alia_, and he will probably agree that so far as Horace is concerned, the argument is supported rather than impugned.—_Tr._ Footnote 131: