Current

“ And nevertheless, your future and your past, your aspect of individuality, and of freedom, and the various aspects wherein you are dependent upon the rest of the world, your whole life of deeds, and your attainment of your individual goal through your deeds, — all these manifold facts that are yours and that constitute you, are present at once to the Absolute, — as facts in the world, as temporal contents eternally viewed, — as a process eternally finished, — but eternally finished precisely by virtue of the temporal sequence of your deeds. ”

“ To faith, and virtue, why so backward, man?
From hence:—the present strongly strikes us all; 1430
The future, faintly: can we, then, be men?
If men, Lorenzo! the reverse is right.
Reason is man’s peculiar: Sense, the brute’s.
The present is the scanty realm of Sense;
The future, Reason’s empire unconfined:
On that expending all her godlike power,
She plans, provides, expatiates, triumphs, there;
There, builds her blessings; there, expects her praise;
And nothing asks of Fortune, or of men.
And what is Reason? Be she thus defined; 1440
Reason is upright stature in the soul. ”

“ For he not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of latest time. ”

“ Truly has it been said that the past is at work in the present, its powers reaching down through the ages, to all the race, largely molding every human life, touching and influencing every individual’s thought and will, and, more than any other force, coloring history. ”

“ It will to me unfold. [Pg 32]
“O man why seekest thou to know
The future, or the past?
The present is enough for you,
If not with clouds o’er cast.”
The mountains seemed to pity me,
The clouds shed showers of tears,
The sun looked down in reverence,
And said: “Allay your fears,”
“For there’s a power that rules mankind,
E’er has and ever will.
The future, and the past, are His,
Are governed by His will.” ”

“ If we must choose in the matter, we should lean to the practical side. One more rule I will venture to submit—they are four in all—if we must choose in these matters, the present is more important to us than the past. ”

“ The present is determined by our past actions, and the future by the present. ”

“ While many are lauding the spirit of the age and holding up to my gaze the picture of forth-coming improvements—opening broad and charming vistas into the almost present future of mental and moral perfection, I cannot help casting a lingering look upon the past. ”

“ If we survey the field of history and ask what feature all great periods of revival, of expansion of the human mind, display in common, we shall find, I think, simply this: that each and all of them have said to the human being, "The inmost nature of the reality is congenial to powers which you possess." ”

“ These subordinate peculiarities will depend first on the peculiar genius, idea and work of the nation, and next on the transient circumstances, geographical, climactic, historical and secular, to which the nation has been exposed. The past helped form the circumstances of the present age, and they the character of the men now living. ”

“ The world wags on and changes, old methods now seem weak, And the changes of a thousand years, of these I fain would speak. I've raised and sponsored many names, that darken history's page, I've made them rulers of the world in many a by-gone age. ”

“ In tracing analogies through the history of the past, the conditions, premonitory, present, and subsequent to great world-movements have often been referred to.
Nothing is more common or more patent than the oft-repeated saying, “This is the age of science.” 211 Any great movement that undertakes at the present day to deal with the deeper problems of individual and social life, must fit in and conform to the “spirit of the present age.” ”

“ It determines him to ideas, to facts for the ideas they cover, not so much to the past as the future, to the past only that he may [Pg 371] guide the present and construct the future. He is to take his run in the past to acquire the momentum of history, his stand in the present and leap into the future. ”

“ Your future is the not yet temporally expressed region wherein you, as finite being, seek your own further expression. That future is still, in one aspect, as we shall see, causally undetermined, precisely in so far as therein something unique, that is yours and yours only, is to appear in the form of various individually designed expressions of your life-purpose, — various individual deeds. ”

“ We knew before the Change, the meanest knew, by glowing moments in ourselves and others, by histories and music and beautiful things, by heroic instances and splendid stories, how fine mankind could be, how fine almost any human being could upon occasion be ”

“ Are we simply separating and contrasting two sides of everybody’s opinion? To which one replies that we are not discussing what we know and believe about the relations of past, present, and future, or of the relation of cause and effect to each other in time. [11] We all know the present depends for its causes on the past, and the future depends for its causes upon the present. ”

“ What is really momentous and all-important with us is the present, by which the future is shaped and colored. ”

“ This is a New Age; overwhelmingly and unmistakably new, shown in ten thousand ways. World changes have occurred of such a nature that no one can successfully question the advances of the last century and a half. ”

“ If I were an institution possessing a guaranty of continued existence I might value the present lightly, knowing a future would come when these matters will be fully understood. Being a creature of the present, however, which may be turned into the past—especially at my time of life—at almost any moment, these matters should become known at the earliest opportunity ”

“ The past preaches to the present, and from its marvellous discourses we venture to infer something of the yet unveiled future. The forces which have worked still labour: the phenomena which they have produced will be repeated. ”

“ Thus, each successive age incorporates into itself the substance of the preceding,—the power whereby the present ever gathers itself into the past, transforms the human race into a colossal man, whose life reaches from the Creation to the Day of Judgment. ”

“ And it is often chance that places in our hands those books which mark the beginning of a new era in the evolution of our ideas. The most casual circumstances, a few lines that happen somehow to come before our eyes, decide our future and plant us in the appointed groove. ”

“ In the Idea, the future Good and the present Want are both present, and the two together make the continuous flow of action—the élan vital or will to live—which constitutes the life of Self. And the analogy must be extended to the life of Nature. ”

“ Nor must we forget that it was in their own chosen field—the world of human thoughts and actions—that they from the beginning seemed to themselves to find the surest evidence of the reality of Progress. ”

“ But while we behold with gratitude the progress of rational truth in regard to the past history of our earth, we recognize with equal delight the beginning of a similar change of opinion in regard to its future destiny. ”

“ He who knows about any people, or epoch, or special development of human nature, how it has come to be what it is and what it tends to, what causes have given it the character it has, and what its relation is to the general development of humanity, has attained to the philosophy of the history of that people, epoch, or development. ”

“ Thus have we endeavoured to pre-figure the whole Earthly Life of Man by a comprehension of its purpose;—to perceive why our Race had to begin its Existence here, and by this means to describe the whole present Life of humankind:—this is what we wished to do,—it was our first task. ”

“ But what sometimes strikes me with some surprise is, not that the present condition of the world, with one sole master, should seem the common-place and natural condition, but that it should have come to seem so common-place and natural—in nine months. ”

“ As to the particular—there is something external and internal in every one; body and soul in every one; this is his present and future world. As to the common signification—there is an external and an internal world, that is, the material world is the present, and the future is the internal world. ”

“ A contemporary thus reveals the state of mind, through which he has come to the persuasion of great insight into the realities, which stand behind the veil: "What more natural, more spontaneous, more imperative, than that the conditions of his future being should press themselves on his anxious thought! ”

“ Then when these luminaries are set in the heaven of man's nature to rule in his day states and night states, truths become vivified and he delights in them. Such truths are typified by the fishes of the sea and the fowls of the air, and by all that the waters brought forth. This is the fifth state of regeneration. ”

“ Then he sees what it is makes the difference, digs the gulf. ‘Science,’ the mind cries, ‘ordered knowledge.’ And so for the first time the modern recognizes what the accumulations of his forefathers have done for him. ”

“ Our age, as we shall learn, contains merely what was implicit in the very waywardness of that revolutionary period. Their youthful enthusiasms, at first vague, wandering, conflicting, took form at length through growth, and produced, in their maturity, our modern doctrine of evolution, our modern efforts to bring into close relation the natural and the spiritual, our whole modern many-sidedness of interest and experience. ”

“ It is to study the succession of events, not as separate units, but as links of one vast chain, on every one of which is inscribed a phrase discoursing of the progress of the human race, and showing the growth of man in the complex, from infancy to adolescence. ”

“ Naturally, I say, we ought by the time of middle life to come to a conception of what sort of things are of most value. By analogy, in the continual growth of the Republic, we ought to have a perception of what we have accomplished and acquired, and some clear view of our tendencies. ”

“ But if our ancestors at the close of the first century could look back with joy and even admiration, at the progress of the country, what emotions must we not feel, when, from the point on which we stand, we also look back and run along the events of the century which has now closed! ”

“ It overlooks the loud, omnipresent hints which tell us that the present state is incomplete and dependent, the part of a great whole, the visible segment of a circle whose complement overarches the invisible world to come, where future correspondences and fulnesses will satisfy and complete present claims and deficiencies. ”

“ The answer to these questions is worth obtaining not only for the sake of what it will tell us of the history of these people’s lives, but also because it will remind us of a change that is now coming over the whole world. ”

“ For our present purpose, I shall maintain the following proposition:—Everything great and good upon which our present existence rests, from which it has proceeded, and on the supposition of which alone our Age can order itself in the way it actually does, has an existence only because noble and powerful men have resigned all the enjoyments of life for the sake of Ideas ”

“ To understand our present moral condition, to be able to give good counsel thereon, you must understand the former generation, and have potentially the spirit of the future generation; must appreciate the past, and yet belong to the future. ”

“ Not to the present is our hour confined,
The great and shadowy future is assigned
To be the glorious empire of the mind.
The past was once the future, and it wrought
In the high presence of on-looking thought;
All that we have, was by its efforts brought.
To-day creates to-morrow, and the tree
Of good or ill grows in past hours, what we
Make for the future—certain is to be. ”

“ There is no pretense to historical continuity, or to a serious study of present conditions, in the single modern essay. It simply considers one phase of our own age, which we doubtless claim to be altogether golden. ”

“ Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions. A correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit. ”

“ "what necessity is there to dwell on the Past, when the Present is so much surer—the Future so much brighter?" ”

“ All these life-histories of countries and individuals stand spread out to God's eternal gaze. At each stage He sees the possibilities foreclosed or initiated; He influences development by the primal distribution in the past and by direction and inspiration in the present. ”