But indeed, we may go further, and say that an atmosphere is left, and that we can feel it, by many ages and cultures which have left no tangible memorials at all; or but few and uninterpretable ones, like the Celtic.  And that each has developed some mood, some indefinable inward color—­which we perceive and inherit.  Each different:  you cannot mistake the Chinese or the Celtic color for the Greek; thought it might be hard to define your perception of either, or of their difference.  It would be hard to say, for instance, that this one was crimson, the other blue; not quite so hard to say that this one affects us as crimson does, that other as blue does.  And yet we can see, I think, that by chasing our impressions to their source, there might be some way of presenting them in symbolic form.  There might be some way of reducing what we feel from the Greeks, or Chinese, or Celts, into a word, a sentence; of writing it down even in a single hieroglyph, of which the elements would be such as should convey to something in us behind the intellect just the indefinable feeling either of these people give us.

In the Chinese writing, with all its difficulty, there is something superior to our alphabets:  an element that appeals to the soul directly, or to the imagination directly, I think.  Suppose you found a Chinese ideogram—­of course there is no such a one—­to express the forgotten Celtic culture; and it proved in analysis, to be composed of the signs for twilight, wind, and pine trees; or wind, night, and wild waters; with certain other elements which not the brain-mind, but the creative soul, would have to supply.  In such a symbol there would be an appeal to the imagination—­that great Wizard within us—­to rise up and supply us with quantities of knowledge left unsaid.  Indeed, I am but trying to illustrate an idea, possibilities....  I think there is a power within the human soul to trace back all growths, the most profuse and complex, to the simple seed from which they sprung; or, just as a single rose or pansy bloom is the resultant, the expression, of the interaction and interplay of innumerable forces—­so the innumerable forces whose interaction makes the history of one race, one culture, could find their ultimate expression in a symbol as simple as a pansy or rose bloom—­color, form and fragrance.  So each national great age would be a flower evolved in the garden of the eternal; and once evolved, once bloomed, it should never pass away; the actual blossom withers and falls; but the color, the form, the fragrance,—­these remain in the world of causes.  And just as you might press a flower in an album, or make a painting of it, and preserve its scent by chemical distillation or what not—­and thereby preserve the whole story of all the forces that went to the production of that bloom—­and they are, I suppose, in number beyond human computation—­so you might express the history of a race in a symbol as simple as a bloom...  And that there is a power,