Moreover classical authors, adopted as subjects of study on the ground of their literary merits, become a bond of mental union among all liberally educated men, by supplying to their memories a common store of thoughts, images, turns of expression, histories, arguments, and modes of treating all subjects of human thought and interest, from the most trivial to the most solemn. These common intellectual possessions of educated men make them feel themselves members of a common human family; not bound together by ties of origin, or territorial abode, or material desires, but by a common mind; a family which has a community of thought and expression, not the result of extraneous accidents, but of the very internal constitution of human nature.
William Whewell, Of a Liberal Education in General, p. 11.
