Page:Education and Life; (IA educationlife00bakerich).pdf/258

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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.

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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