The thrifty man lays up money for his old age. The farmer lays up fodder
for his winter feeding. The medical student lays up information for use
in his future practise. The intelligent, by due exercise and diet, lay
up health, and the wastrel lays up trouble and disease by his excesses.
All of us lay up something, willy-nilly.
It is a good idea to ask one’s self, in considering any act we are about
to perform, not only what will be the immediate pleasure in it, but what
sort of product we are laying up for ourselves by it.
We are always coming into our inheritance from our past deeds.
Maeterlinck says, “There is one thing that can never turn into
suffering, and that is the good we have done.”
This day you may have to decide between doing a thing that will gain you
a thousand dollars and a thing that will cost you ten. In making up your
mind it is well to take into consideration what happiness dividend the
transaction is going to bring you ten years from now.
The world you live in is formed on the laying-up principle. Nature gains
her ends as a child learns to walk and talk, by infinite repetitions.
She does the same thing over and over. She is eternally learning how.
Think how many centuries she practised in fish-flappers, bird-wings, and
animal fore-legs until she could make a human arm.
Let the scientist tell you of the infinite trials that preceded the
formation of an eye, an ear, a human brain.
The efficiency of every age depends upon what was laid up for it by the
ages gone before. This age of coal and petroleum rests upon the long
cycles of the carboniferous era, when summer after summer giant trees
grew and fell, and in the crucible of earth were changed to coal and
oil!
Nature never forgets. She never drops a stitch. What she does now is a
part of what she has in mind for ten thousand years from now. The plan
of the oak is in the acorn.
“The books were opened,” says the Apocalypse, describing the Day of
Judgment, “and the dead were judged out of the things that were written
in the books.” This parable is but a picture of the scientist’s
declaration that our EVERY ACT LEAVES ITS RUT IN THE BRAIN, making us
prone to repeat; what we feel today we more readily feel tomorrow; every
functioning of body or mind, in fact, having memory-making as a
by-product. The whole process looks toward a future man.
Creation is cumulative. That is the meaning of evolution.
The human race is cumulative. That we learn from reading history.
The individual life is cumulative. Every day is for future days. Every
sensation and every act of will, everything I do, has a bearing upon the
me that shall be ten years from this time—a thousand, a million years
hence—who knows?
Hence, if any one chooses to believe that, after this long
getting-ready, Nature is going to throw me, body and soul, back into the
scrap-heap, let him believe it.
Nature ought to have as much sense as I have. And I certainly would not
go to all the pains Nature takes in preparing a human spirit only to
fling my product at last into the ditch.