They are all essential to ethnic progress; though the special cultivation of one or the other must be dictated by the circumstances. The development must be in relation to the inner (mental) and outer (physical) demands upon the group, if it is to make the best of its life. They are the physiological elements of collective mental growth, standing in relation to it as do proper food, exercise, cleanliness, and the other hygienic methods to bodily health and strength.
1. Remembrance.—Knowledge is of no avail unless it is remembered. Experience may become prophetic, but if its words are forgotten, of what use is its wisdom? Hence the rudest savages seek means to strengthen their recollection of events and ideas. The Australian has his message stick, the Peruvian his knotted string (quipu), the Chippeway his meday club,—all to help preserve tradition, ritual, knowledge, in some form.
Whatever technical process was devised to shape a war club, or to minister to the sense of beauty by adornment, whatever laws were framed to regulate the clan, whatever secrets were learned from nature, became of value to the group only in so far as the faculty of memory and the means of remembrance were cultivated.
I need not refer to the supreme treasure of written records, the national literatures of the world; but it is worth noting that just to the extent that a nation cherishes its own history, lives in its past deeds, drinks from its own fonts of thought, does it develop its vitality and independence.
Tradition and instruction in what the group has already gained is the first condition of further advance. If the future is to rest on a secure foundation, it must be built on the experience of the past. Plato estimated the alphabet none too highly when he called it a gift of the gods. The dream of immortality in name is a mighty stimulus to effort. What were that fame worth that perished with our flesh?
Under this head also comes what we broadly call Education, that which distributes to the new generation the garnered grain and treasured pearls of hundreds of older generations; which places in the hands of the young the tools of thought, the training in vocations, the pride in the noble achievements of the past, the acquaintance with their own powers and the means of increasing them, the precepts of justice, of love, and of truth, and the inspiration of grand ideals of life and work.
No past is too remote to be destitute of practical value to the present. No truth is too trivial to be regarded. Knowledge has long and wisely been esteemed the synonym of power. Art, science, the whole fabric of culture, are accumulations, memories, of millenniums of labour, of whose results all has been lost except that which has been recollected.
2. Industry.—The secret of all improvement in human life is the conscious effort to improve. Idleness is the chief obstacle to advancement. Disuse of brain-function degenerates the tissues faster than misuse. Labour, work, activity, exercise,—these are the only means to strengthen the powers we have and insure their survival.
Not all effort is equally beneficial. It may be honestly intended, but misdirected, and lead to perdition; it may be the tread-mill labour which reduces the man to a machine, and blunts and dulls his soul; it may be, as with those who “work hard at play,” consumed in frivolous pastimes and trivial objects.
The true aim of all effort, that aim which most contributes to progress, is the conquest of the environment, the subjection of it to the enlightened reason and the individual will. “The one process of human evolution,” says a thoughtful writer, “is the passage from a merely mechanical to a rational life.”