“Yet I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs,
And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns.”
In the process of development nature goes from potentiality to higher and higher actuality; what is in its being as tendency becomes real. We may not suppose the movement that of spontaneous energy toward accidental results, but rather the progressive realization of what is in the entire rational scheme of the universe.
From the nebular mass sprang worlds and suns greater and less, substance and form in infinite variety, plant life in progressive orders, animal life in ascending types. Conscious existence gradually became responsive to the multitude of nature’s impressions. The broken rays of light displayed their rainbow hues to the growing power and delicacy of the eye; sound revealed its keys, qualities, and harmonies to the increasing susceptibility of the ear. Mind, as it developed, realized in its consciousness new laws and ever greater wonders of the outer world. On the objective side the laws were, the tinted sky and the murmuring stream were, before mind became cognizant of them in their perfection and beauty. Any serious contemplation of the great law of development, in its full meaning, should inspire hope and purpose in life. It suggests, not only sublime fulfilment for the world, but large possibility for the individual man. The natural world, plants, animals, the human race, institutions, science, art, religion, all animate individual beings, man as an individual, have their history of development, which suggests its lesson.
Nature is aspiration. From chaos to the world of this geologic age, from protoplasm to man, from savagery to civilization, from ignorance to culture, from symbolism to developed art, from egoism to altruism, from germ to fruit, from infancy to maturity, from realization to higher realization, has been the process. And this plan seems the only one adapted to satisfy the nature and thought of rational being. A world perfected, all possibilities realized, no chance for higher attainment—these are conditions of monotony and death. The old Heraclitus was right when he proclaimed the principle of the world to be a becoming.
The child’s history, in a way, is an epitome of the history of the race. At first he is deaf and blind to the world of objects. Note how the possibilities of his being become realities, how knowledge grows in variety and definiteness, until the external world stands revealed, each object in its place, each event in its order, until notions of time, space, cause, and right rise into consciousness. The child is father of the man in the sense that the man can become only what he was implicitly in childhood.
There is a tale of Greek mythology that Minerva sprang full-grown from the head of Jove—a perfect being. We would rather contemplate a being with possibilities not completely revealed. A philosopher said that if Truth were a bird which he had caught and held in his hand he would let it escape for the pleasure of renewed pursuit. There are the wonders of nature and of physical evolution; but transcendently great are the wonders of mind, and the view of its possibilities of endless development—a thing that we believe will live on, when the sun, moon, and stars shall be darkened.
The educated young man of to-day is the heir of the ages. All that science, art, literature, philosophy, civilization have achieved is his. All that thought has realized through ages of slow progress, all that has been learned through the mistakes made in the dim light of the dawn of human history, all that has been wrought out through devotion, struggle, and suffering, he may realize by the process of individual education. The law of progress still holds for the race and for him. He is a free factor, with a duty to help realize still more of the promise of human existence.