It is above all
things imperative to strive, to have a goal, to seek it on our own legs,
to cry for the moon rather than for nothing at all. And Nature teaches
us unequivocally that our purpose is ever onward--
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until we die.
It is to go, and not to get, that is the glory. To be content is to have
no ideal beyond the real; we were better dead and nourishing grass. It
is part of the whole structure of life, as we can read it, whether in
the animal or in the vegetable world, but pre-eminently in ourselves,
that the very body of the individual is constructed as for purpose; nay
more, as for the purposes of the future. Every little baby girl that is
born into the world bears upon her soft surface signs and portents--not
merely promise, but the promise of provision--for the life of the world
to come. At her very birth she teaches us that she is not created for
self alone, but for what will be. Running through the whole body--and
this the more markedly the higher the type of life--we find organs,
tissues, functions, co-ordinations existing not for the present, but for
the life of the world to come. When, some day, the social organism is as
rightly constructed as the body of any woman, or even, in some measure,
of any man, when it is similarly dedicated to the real future, and as
resolutely turned away from any worship of what no longer is, then
heaven will be nearer to earth.
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