all belong, where action, enjoyment, and experience do not involve
competition or depend on possession and mastery.

Finally, the intuitions that art provides are relatively permanent.
Art not only extends life and enables us to share it, but also preserves
it. Existence has a leak in it, as Plato said; experience flows in and
then flows out forever. The individual passes from one act to another,
from one phase of life to another, childhood, then youth, then old
age. So the race; one generation follows another, and each type of
civilization displaces a predecessor. Against this flux, our belief
in progress comforts us; maturity is better than youth, we think, and
each generation happier and more spiritual than the last. Yet the
consolations of progress are partial. For even if we always do go on
to something better in the future, the past had its unique value, and
that is lost ineluctably. The present doubtless repeats much of the
form of the past--the essential aspects of human nature remain the
same; but the subtle, distinctive bloom of each stage of personal life,
and of each period of the world's history, is transient. We cannot
again become children, nor can we possess again the strenuous freedom
of the Renaissance or the unclouded integrity of personality of the
Greeks.

In the life of the individual, however, the flux is not absolute; for
through memory we preserve something of the unique value of our past.
Its vividness, its fullness, the sharp bite of its reality go; but a
subtilized essence remains. And the worth that we attach to our
personality depends largely upon it; for the instinct of self-
preservation penetrates the inner world; we strive not only to maintain
our physical existence in the present, but our psychic past as well.
In conserving the values of the past through memory we find a