The Life of the World to Come : Part 2

Woman and Womanhood: A Search for Principles
by C. W. Saleeby, M.D.

(Page 3 of 25)

Assuredly we should never use this word "progress" without reminding ourselves of the cardinal distinction that exists between two forms that it may manifest. There is a progress which consists in and depends upon an advance in the constitution of the living individual; and, so far as we are more mental and less physical than the men who have left us such relics as the Neanderthal skull, in so far we exemplify this kind of progress. But, on the other hand, we can claim progress as compared with even the Greeks in some respects, though there is no evidence whatever that, so far as the individual is concerned, there is any natural, inherent, organic progress. But we know more. Our school-boys know more than Aristotle. We stand upon Greek shoulders. This is traditional progress - something outside the germ-plasma; a thing dependent upon our great human faculty of speech.

That, surely, is why the word infantine was rightly used in our first paragraph. For we may ask why, if man be millions of years old, any record of progress should be a matter of only a few thousand years - perhaps not more than fifteen or twenty. The answer, I believe, is that traditional progress depends upon the possibility of tradition. Now speech, apart from writing, involves the possibility of tradition from generation to generation, and I am very sure that "Man before speech" is a myth; the more we learn of the anthropoid apes the surer we may be of that. But, after all, the possibilities of progress dependent upon aural memory are sadly limited; not only because it is easy to forget, but because it is also conspicuously easy to distort, as a familiar round-game testifies.

The greatest of all the epochs in human history was that which saw the genesis of written speech. I believe that hundreds of thousands, no millions, of preceding years were substantially sterile just because the educational acquirements of individuals could be transmitted to their children neither in the germ-plasma (for we know such transmission to be impossible), nor outside the germ-plasma, by means of writing. The invention of written language accounts, then, we may suppose, for the otherwise incomprehensible disparity between the blank record of long ages, and the great achievement of recent history - an achievement none the less striking if we remember that the historical epoch includes a thousand years of darkness. therefore, as was said at the Royal Institution in 1907, when discussing the nature of progress, we may argue in a new sense that the historians have made history: it is the possibility of recording that has given us something to record.

Now, it is in terms of this latter kind of progress that our duty to the past, as we conceive it, may be defined. And in its terms also must we define the grounds of our veneration for the past. None of us invented language, spoken or written; nor yet numbers, nor the wheel, nor much else. We see further than our ancestors because we stand upon their shoulders, and, as Coleridge hinted, this may be so even though we be dwarfs and they were giants. Some of us see this. How can we fail to do so? And the past becomes in our eyes a very real thing, to which we are so greatly indebted that we should even live for it. But there is a great danger, dependent upon a great error, here. Let us consider what is our right attitude towards the past. We are its children and its heirs. We are infinitely indebted to it. We must love and venerate that which was lovable and venerable in it. But are we to live for it?

If we could imagine ourselves coming from afar and contemplating the sequence of universal phenomena now for the first time, we should realize that the past, though real, because it was once real, is yet a fleeting aspect of change, and, in a very real sense also, is not. Nor, indeed, is the future; but it will be. We cannot alter, we cannot benefit, we cannot serve the past, because it is not and will not be. Our besetting tendency as individuals is to live for our own pasts, more especially as we grow old; to become retrospective, to cease to look forward, even to dedicate what remains to us of life to the service of what is not at all. In this respect, as in so many others, we are less wise than children. We will not let the dead bury its dead. This is also the tendency of all institutions. Even if there were founded an Institute of the Future, dedicated to the life of this world to come, after only one generation its administrators would be consulting the interests of the past, turning to the service of the name and the memory of their founder, though it was for the future that he lived. Throughout all our social institutions we can perceive this same worship of what no longer is at the cost of the most real of all real things, which is the life of the generation that is and the generations that are to be.

Everywhere the price for this idolatry is exacted. The perpetual image of it is Lot's wife, who, looking backwards upon that from which she had escaped, was turned into a pillar of salt. Nature may or may not have a purpose, and exhibit designs for that purpose; she may or may not, in philosophical language, be teleological. Man is and must be teleological. We must live for the morrow, for what will be, whether as individuals or as a nation, or our ways are the ways of death. This is looked upon as a human failing - that man never is, but always to be blessed; that man is never satisfied, that he will not rest content with present achievement.

Well, it is stated of our first cousin, once removed, the orang-outang, that in the adult state he is aroused only for the snatching of food, and then "relapses into repose." His reach does not exceed his grasp, and one need not preach contentment to him. But we, the latest and highest products of the struggle for existence, we are strugglers by constitution; and when we relapse into repose we degenerate. Only on condition of living for the morrow can we remain human. Put a sound limb on crutches and you paralyze it; wear smoked glasses and your eyes become intolerant of light, or wear glasses that make the muscle of accommodation superfluous and it atrophies; take pepsin and hydrochloric acid and the stomach will become incapable of producing them; cease to chew and your teeth decay; let the newspaper prepare your mental food as the cook cuts up your physical food, and you will become incapable of thought - that is, of mental mastication and digestion. It is above all things imperative to strive, to have a goal, to seek it on our own legs, to cry for the moon rather than for nothing at all. And Nature teaches us unequivocally that our purpose is ever onward:

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until we die.

Press of J. J. Little & Ives Co., New York.
Copyright 1911 by Mitchell Kennerley.