"The greatest friend of truth is time."
WHAT WE INHERIT FROM THE PAST.
The world moves only through the constant accumulation and conservation
of force--the force of mind. We are not capable of conceiving the
immense wastage of this force from year to year and from century to
century. If we produce a great inventor we are ignorantly proud of him.
We wonder at him as if he were a miracle. A great thinker in mechanics,
in art, in science, in letters, astonishes as if he were a prodigy, when
he is really only an approach to what all men have the right to be, to
what all men may become when the right mind has applied to it the right
compelling power of suggestion from the force of other minds. As surely
as the plant is involved in its seed, so surely is all the progress of
the future involved in the thought of the past, recorded in books as far
as it is possible to record it at all. The telephone, the telegraph, the
phonograph, the steam-engine, the power loom--every result of the
application of mind in the subjection of matter--existed in the minds of
men and was recorded in books years before the thought gave suggestion
to the mind which applied it practically. Back of the mind of the great
thinker in poetry, in statesmanship, in science, in mechanics, is the
conserved force of the minds preceding him. But what does it all avail
if it is wasted? We may have now a thousand Edisons, Fultons, Morses and
Maurys, inert and practically useless because of force unapplied that
might set them in motion to make the lives of millions, born and unborn,
easier and happier. We have poets, statesmen, scientists, and inventors
as unknown and unproductive as the worms which change them into
productive forms of matter in country church-yards, where some Gray
finds them and touches us with a sense of their loss to us without
suggesting the remedy. What remedy is there if it is not this of making
the suggested possibility of the past the endeavor of the present and
the achievement of the future? How is that possible, if we regard our
capable men as miracles, when our own incapacity to understand is the
only miracle when we leave the great possibilities of mind in unnumbered
"thousands to die with the matter of their bodies? Charity builds a
small-pox hospital and men bless it--rightly. It benefits its hundreds
and its thousands. The same benevolence, operating under the force of
the conserved energy of mind, discovers vaccination, and so benefits
millions and tens of millions for ages after the small-pox hospital is
back in the clay from which its bricks were burned. There is here no
parallel possible between the results achieved--those of the one hand so
immensely exceed those of the other. The whole problem of the present
and future is to bring the accumulated force of suggestion from the past
to bear on the given point--on the mind of the living man, capable in
possibility, and failing to achieve only for lack of stimulus--of force,
of power--as a steam-engine is incapable without force applied from
without. And as it is the last shovel of coal that sets the engine to
work, so the mind, prepared for the final suggestion that is to give it
its highest usefulness, will remain inert if the suggestion fails it.
These suggestions may come from nature or directly from other minds, but
in the main they come from the force of mind preserved in books. Can
there be any greater, any more capable benevolence, than that which
gives this force its widest possible application? A million dollars may
endow a hospital for a century. Half as much in an endowment making a
library free may bring pressure to bear on some brain, that, as a
result, will save more suffering for the human race than has been saved
by vaccination."
LONGEVITY.