Future generations

“ To your hands, to your care is entrusted the fate of young generations, the fate of the future community, which, consciously or unconsciously, you fashion according to the accepted standards and traditions with which you have been imbued in your own education. ”

“ I said, thinking a little. "I believe it will be easier and clearer for the generations to come; our experience will be at their service. But one wants to live apart from future generations and not only for their sake. ”

“ As I understand it, he wished to inculcate the idea that one generation lays the foundation for succeeding generations. The rough affairs of life very largely fall to the earlier generation, while the next one has the privilege of dealing with the higher and more æsthetic things of life. ”

“ Our generation, like all preceding generations of mankind, inevitably takes what it finds largely for granted, and the great mass of men who argue about existing conditions assume a fundamental likeness to past conditions as the basis of their conclusions in regard to the present and the still unrolled future. ”

“ And future generations, by virtue of a broader perspective and a deeper insight, may give little heed to what we look upon as significant,—much as we pronounce irrelevant and superstitious the minute observances whereby primitive folk strive to attract the good fortunes and to avoid the dangers of human existence. ”

“ You must give to rising generations the benefit of the afflatus of the genius of a preceding generation and also—if it exists—of their own. It is the nature of the environment which in most cases decides the future of clever young men and of the future of nations. ”

“ We shall teach the special sciences and their history in the true philosophical spirit of searching for clarity and, by doing this, we shall develop the philosophical mind of future generations. This is all we can do, but it will be a great step in the mental progress of our race. ”

“ What we most need, in my opinion, for the next few generations, is such an education as will help us most effectually to conquer [Pg 121] the forces of nature;—I mean in the general sense of supplying food, clothing, homes, and a substantial provision for the future. ”

“ The past, save what we discover in our generation, is our sole storehouse of materials. And a very small part of our useful knowledge in the industrial arts, in science, in social organization and administration does come from our own generation. It is the accumulated experience of generations of men. ”

“ There is, there must be, another conception, more lofty than this conception of progress; a conception of progress as the accumulated effort of generations. Is it not true that each generation creates forms of beauty, and discovers new truths and virtues? Can we not say that generations really do show progress, if they succeed in preserving the creations of preceding epochs, and in erecting on them as a basis more complex and elevated creations of their own? ”

“ But as society proceeds in its development, its phaenomena are determined, more and more, not by the simple tendencies of universal human nature, but by the accumulated influence of past generations over the present. ”

“ How one generation has improved upon another, and how discovery and invention, and labour and skill, and industry and genius, have covered the earth with a succession of wonders; and then to think, how a sort of representative epitome of these is to stand before us in the marvellous contents of the last and greatest wonder of the world! ”

“ Let us all, in fact, compete—we who are working, some with our brains, others with our hands, and others with our machines—like one man for the father-land. Thus the living generation will be able to see what its fore-fathers have made in the midst of hard circumstances, and to realize what tasks are awaiting us and the new generations in the path which has been smoothed by the sweat, labor, and pain of our ancestors. ”

“ They involve generation in generation, and thus, going back from age to age, and from necessity to necessity, up to the origin of the world, they forge a close and enormous chain, which girds and binds the human race. ”

“ They were constantly feeling the breath of the future pass in their long hair, and thrill through their long beards. They looked for the man of the future, the society of the future, the science of the future, the art of the future, the religion of the future. ”

“ The lives of generations are spent to maintain it, and carry it on. The utmost that the state can do is to satisfy the purposes of its existence for these generations in return for what they have spent on it. ”

“ From generation to generation, from century to century, from age to age, as time has rolled on, there has been a gradual moving onward and upward, a steady improvement both in the refining and civilizing of man's own being and in bringing that being into sympathetic relations with the external world, that is, a gradual development of man's own powers, and an ever increasing control of the forces of nature. ”

“ But may not people go on and learn more, instead of standing still? And don't the needs of different generations differ? Doesn't human nature take fresh developments from time to time, wanting varieties of help? ”

“ It is one of the chief characteristics of the human race that the knowledge acquired by one generation can be passed on to the generations that follow; and that, in this way, progress in the betterment of life's results and the adaptation of means to ends can make a steady and reliable advance. ”

“ This essential nucleus, thus stripped, reveals itself as the systematic direction of the moulding forces that play upon the developing citizen, towards his improvement, with a view to a new generation of individuals, a new social state, at a higher level than that at which we live to-day, a new generation which will apply the greater power, ampler knowledge and more definite will our endeavours will give it, to raise its successor still higher in the scale of life. ”

“ For him, and this is the significant point for us here, any notion of a future life for humanity, in the accepted sense of immortality, is bound up with, and indeed based upon, the conception of progressive development. ”

“ Like the generations which have preceded us, we enter into the labors of others, and inherit the fruits of their effort. But these powerful instruments, condensing time and space, endow a single half-century with the possibilities of a cycle. ”

“ Still the future of civilization lies, he thought, in the hands of young men like that; of young men such as he was, thirty years ago; with their love of abstract principles; getting books sent out to them all the way from London to a peak in the Himalayas; reading science; reading philosophy. The future lies in the hands of young men like that, he thought. ”

“ The earnest and effective means which are in operation throughout this State for the education of the rising generation are the most certain and beautiful signs of its own fresh vitality and an augury of a great future. ”

“ The changes which it may produce are not sensible within a generation—for, indeed, the very nature of the case implies that they must take many generations—not perhaps even within such a period as is covered by all authentic history. ”

“ That the life and development of a society is independent of, and far more prolonged than, the life and development of any of its component units: who are severally born, grow, work, reproduce, and die, while the body politic composed of them survives generation after generation, increasing in mass, completeness of structure, and functional activity. ”

“ The transformation in the way that great numbers of ordinary people are coming to see themselves—a change that is dramatically abrupt in the perspective of the history of civilization—raises fundamental questions about the role assigned to the general body of humanity in the planning of our planet’s future. ”

“ Will not the future take a wider view, and form a more generous conception? For the true object of education is that each body should have its own hygiene, and each mind its own Renaissance, and each soul its own Reformation. ”

“ But we must begin at once, that each year may see the advancing life of a new generation, strong, intelligent, as much in love with science as with the Fatherland, having in their hearts the double sentiment that he serves his country well only when he serves it with his reason and his arm. ”

“ Religion, industry, state, education, and literature have been consciously transformed by the heroic efforts of such great men of the world, and these conscious and artificial transformations of the several aspects of social life have been the constituents of a new environment and thus the seeds of Renaissance. ”

“ If it be true that it takes several generations to perfect a race from a physical point of view, it is equally true that several generations are{65} needed for the development of the moral and intellectual qualities. ”

“ A Child of hope? Do generations press
On generations, without progress made?
Halts the Individual, ere his hairs be grey,
Perforce? ”

“ With these two lines of study to our hands, we could predict the vitality, the growing power, and the future possibilities of the social life of which we are a tiny though not an insignificant part; we could, knowing something of the response that we make to that which surrounds us, form some estimate of how the future ages will develop, and, knowing the intensity of the different national desires for progress and the causes which are likely to arouse such desires, we could realise what will stimulate and what will retard all that is best in our civic life. ”

“ But it seems to me that in walking the streets of London and Paris I shall revert to my student days, and appear to myself like a relic of a former generation. Those who have been born into the inheritance of the new civilization feel very differently about it from those who have lived their way into it. To the young and those approaching middle age all these innovations in life and thought are as natural, as much a matter of course, as the air they breathe; they form a part of the inner framework of their intelligence, about which their mental life is organized. ”

“ By diffusing the influence of good education through the whole people, will the whole people be elevated, and the next generation similarly treated, and having inherited a higher nature, will be elevated still more, and so on infinitely. ”

“ Thirty-three generations go to a thousand years. There are some two hundred and sixty-four or two hundred and seventy generations intervening between you and me. Each generation makes some discovery that advances civilization a stage, the next enters on the discoveries of the preceding generations, and so culture advances stage by stage. Man is infinitely progressive, the brute beast is not. ”

“ Yet such is the union of all mankind, that, with the aid of the present generation, in a few years he will learn all that mankind has learned in its long history; next go beyond that, discovering and creating anew; and then draw up to the same height the new generation, which will presently surpass him. ”

“ Progress and development mark everything in nature—human societies, as well as everything else. Nothing in the physical world is still; life and motion are in everything; so in the mental, moral, and political. ”

“ In that part of the world, upon that new-found half of the globe, mankind, late in its history, was thus afforded an opportunity to set up a new civilization; here it was strangely privileged to make a new human experiment. ”

“ Having argued thus far to show that the present age, material, mental and spiritual, is the legitimate result of the law of progressive development, the following propositions are deduced therefrom, forming a basis or platform from which to ask of the present—What of the future? ”

“ If each generation were compelled to learn how to build fires, to employ language, to shape pottery, to weave, to print and to harness electricity all over again, it would seldom get farther than the rudiments of what is now called civilization.
The new knowledge that is gained in each generation is obtained through experiment, but many costly errors are avoided in these experiments through the wisdom that is based on the accumulated knowledge of the past. ”

“ Every old error or abuse which is removed opens new chances of development to all the new energy of society. Every improvement in education, science, art, or government expands the chances of man on earth. ”

“ The conditions of this generation demand that we should be reminded that, beyond bodies to be clothed, and tastes to be cultivated, and wealth to be accumulated, there is in each one of us an intellect to be developed and, by means of it, truth to be discerned, which, beside all other undertakings to which the mind of man can bend itself, should forever be foremost and supreme. ”

“ On which I am the more disposed, and even compelled, here to insist, because your modern ideas of Development imply that you must all turn out what you are to be, and find out what you are to know, for yourselves, by the inevitable operation of your anterior affinities and inner consciences:—whereas the old idea of education was that the baby material of you, however accidentally or inevitably born, was at least to be by external force, and ancestral knowledge, bred ”

“ Each generation should pass on to the next the treasures which it has inherited, beneficially modified by its own experience, and enlarged by the acquisitions which itself has gained.
Sometimes the stream of human development seems to pause and the years seem to roll on without change. ”