The first and the most enduring result of this movement of ideas is
the enlargement of the thoughts of men about themselves and their
world. Every great new truth compels, sooner or later, a readjustment
of the whole body of organised truth as men hold it. The fresh thought
about the physical constitution of man bears its fruit ultimately in
some fresh notion of his spiritual constitution; the new fact in
geology does not spend its force until it has wrought a modification
of the view of the creative method and the age of man in the world;
the fresh conception of the method of evolution along material and
physical lines slowly reconstructs the philosophy of mental and
spiritual development. Every new thought relates itself finally to all
thought, and is like the forward step which continually changes the
horizon about the traveller.

The history of man is the story of the ideas he has entertained and
accepted, and of his struggle to incorporate these ideas into laws,
customs, institutions, and character. At the heart of every race one
finds certain ideas, not always clearly seen nor often definitely
formulated save by a few persons, but unconsciously held with
deathless tenacity and illustrated by a vast range of action and
achievement; at the heart of every great civilisation one finds a few
dominant and vital conceptions which give a certain coherence and
unity to a vast movement of life. Now, the books of life, as has
already been said, hold their place in universal literature because
they reveal and illustrate, in symbol and personality, these
fundamental ideas with supreme power and felicity. The large body of
literature in prose and verse which is put between the covers of the
Old Testament not only gives us an account of what the Hebrew race did
in the world, but of its ideas about that world, and of the character
which it formed for itself largely as the fruit of those ideas. Those