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.
HUMAN FLIES
Oh for a human fly-swatter! That is, for some sort of a swatter that would obliterate the human fly.