Beneath these specifically religious forces and permeating the whole community there is, I think, a vaguer but deeper religion- the faith in enlightenment, the aspiration to be just, the sympathy with the multiform thoughts and labors of humanity. This is surely the noblest aspiration, and one which unites us to all ages and places in which men have cultivated reason. No one, I am sure, who has felt this high passion and freely fostered it in these halls, will put any place above Harvard in his affection. Some universities have greater beauty and a richer past, some have maturer scholars and more famous teachers, Yale herself has more unity, more energy, and greater fitness to our present conditions. Harvard, instead of all these advantages, has freedom, both from external trammels and the pleasant torpor of too fixed a tradition. She has freedom and a single eye for the truth, and these are enough to secure for her, if the world goes well, an incomparable future.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "Beneath these specifically religious forces and permeating the whole community there is, I think, a vaguer but deeper religion- the faith in enlightenment, the aspiration to be just, the sympathy with the multiform thoughts and labors of humanity. This is surely the noblest aspiration, and one which unites us to all ages and places in which men have cultivated reason. No one, I am sure, who has felt this high passion and freely fostered it in these halls, will put any place above Harvard in his affection. Some universities have greater beauty and a richer past, some have maturer scholars and more famous teachers, Yale herself has more unity, more energy, and greater fitness to our present conditions. Harvard, instead of all these advantages, has freedom, both from external trammels and the pleasant torpor of too fixed a tradition. She has freedom and a single eye for the truth, and these are enough to secure for her, if the world goes well, an incomparable future." in the context of "George Santayana, in Harvard Monthly in 1892, as quoted by Samuel Eliot Morison in Three Centuries of Harvard (1936), Cambridge: Harvard University Press, seventh printing (1965), p. 484" to mean that wisdom is timeless.