uch as the trunks of certain trees are
formed by the absorption of the leaves. He is made up of the Past.
This is a happy and an inspiriting discovery, insomuch as it holds
out a resplendent promise that there may yet come a man of the
future made out of our present which will then be the past. It is a
discovery which calls upon us for new and larger moral and physical
exertion, which throws upon us wider and nobler duties, for upon us
depends the future. At one blow this new light casts aside those
melancholy convictions which, judging from the evil blood which
seemed to stain each new generation alike, had elevated into a faith
the depressing idea that man could not advance. It explains the
causes of that stain, the reason of those imperfections, not
necessary parts of the ideal man, but inherited from a lower order
of life, and to be gradually expunged.

But this marvellous mystery of inheritance has brought with it a
series of mental instincts, so to say; a whole circle of ideas of
moral conceptions, in a sense belonging to the Past--ideas which
were high and noble in the rudimentary being, which were beyond the
capacity of the pure animal, but which are now in great part merely
obstructions to advancement. Let these perish. We must seek for
enlightenment and for progress, not in the dim failing traditions
of a period but just removed from the time of the rudimentary or
primeval man--we must no longer allow the hoary age of such
traditions to blind the eye and cause the knee to bend--we must no
longer stultify the mind by compelling it to receive as infallible
what in the very nature of things must have been fallible to the
highest degree. The very plants are wiser far. They seek the light
of to-day, the heat of the sun which shines at this hour; they make
no attempt to guide their life by the feeble reflection of rays
which were extinguished ages ago. This slender blade of grass,
beside the edge of our rug under the chestnut-tree, shoots upwards
in the fresh air of to-day; its roots draw nourishment from the
moisture of the dew which heaven deposited this morning. If it does
make use of the past--of the soil, the earth that has accumulated in
centuries--it is to advance its present growth. Root out at once and
for ever these primeval, narrow, and contracted ideas; fix the mind
upon the sun of the present, and prepare for the sun that must rise
to-morrow. It is our duty to develop both mind and body and soul to
th