the thrifty man lays up money for his old age. the farmer lays up fodder for his winter feeding. the medical student lays up information for use in his future practise. the intelligent, by due exercise and diet, lay up health, and the wastrel lays up trouble and disease by his excesses.
all of us lay up something, willy-nilly.
it is a good idea to ask one’s self, in considering any act we are about to perform, not only what will be the immediate pleasure in it, but what sort of product we are laying up for ourselves by it.
we are always coming into our inheritance from our past deeds.
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maeterlinck says, “there is one thing that can never turn into suffering, and that is the good we have done.”
this day you may have to decide between doing a thing that will gain you a thousand dollars and a thing that will cost you ten. in making up your mind it is well to take into consideration what happiness dividend the transaction is going to bring you ten years from now.
the world you live in is formed on the laying-up principle. nature gains her ends as a child learns to walk and talk, by infinite repetitions. she does the same thing over and over. she is eternally learning how.
think how many centuries she practised in fish-flappers, bird-wings, and animal fore-legs until she could make a human arm.
let the scientist tell you of the infinite 98 trials that preceded the formation of an eye, an ear, a human brain.
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 99 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.
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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.
