But are we to live for it?
If we could imagine ourselves coming from afar and contemplating the
sequence of universal phenomena now for the first time, we should
realize that the past, though real, because it was once real, is yet a
fleeting aspect of change, and, in a very real sense also, _is_ not.
Nor, indeed, _is_ the future; but it will be. We cannot alter, we cannot
benefit, we cannot serve the past, because it is not and will not be.
Our besetting tendency as individuals is to live for our own pasts, more
especially as we grow old; to become retrospective, to cease to look
forward, even to dedicate what remains to us of life to the service of
what is not at all. In this respect, as in so many others, we are less
wise than children. We will not let the dead bury its dead. This is also
the tendency of all institutions. Even if there were founded an
Institute of the Future, dedicated to the life of this world to come,
after only one generation its administrators would be consulting the
interests of the past, turning to the service of the name and the memory
of their founder, though it was for the future that he lived. Throughout
all our social institutions we can perceive this same worship of what no
longer is at the cost of the most real of all real things, which is the
life of the generation that is and the generations that are to be.
Everywhere the price for this idolatry is exacted.
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