But this freedom has been often abused. Relieved of the necessity of explaining continuity, philosophers, biologists, historians, and even students of language, literature, and the arts, have been too frequently content to let the fact of continuity do all the explaining that needs to be done. To discover the historical origins and trace the descent of ideas, institutions, customs, and forms of life, have been for many the exclusive and sufficient occupation, to the neglect of experimental science and with the consequent failure to make us very much wiser in our attempts to control the intricate factors of human living. If we would appreciate our own morals and religion we are often advised to consider primitive man and his institutions. If we would evaluate marriage or property, we are often directed to study our remote ancestors. And this practical advice has sometimes taken the form of metaphysics. If we wish to know the nature of things or to appraise their worth, we are told to contemplate some primitive cosmic stuff from which everything has been derived. Thus man and all the varied panorama of the world vanish backward into nebulæ, and life disappears into the impulse to live. Not trailing clouds of glory do we come, but trailing the primitive and the obsolete. Such considerations as these have diverse effects according to our temperaments. They quite uniformly produce, however, disillusionment and sophistication. That is the usual result of inquisitions into one's ancestry. But disillusionment and sophistication may produce either regret or rebellion. This exaltation of the past, as the ancestral home of all that we are, may make us regret our loss of illusions and our disconcerting enlightenment. It had been better for us to have lived then when illusions were cherished and vital, than to live now when they are exposed and artificial. The joy of living has been sapped, and we may cry with Matthew Arnold's Obermann "Oh, had I lived in that great day!" Or disillusionment and sophistication may beget rebellion. We may break with the past, scorn an inheritance so redolent of blood and lust and superstition, revel in an emancipation unguided by the discipline of centuries, strive to create a new world every day, and imagine that, at last, we have begun to make progress.