"The first constituent, then, of the new view is that of continuity. We of the new generation realize that the present is a mere transition from the past into the future; that no event and no moment is isolated; that all things, successive as well as coincident, are bound in a single system. Of this system the general formula is causation. But, in human society, the specifically important case of it is the nexus of successive generations. We do not now, we who reflect, regard man as an individual, nor even as one of a body of contemporaries; we regard him as primarily a son and a father. In other words, what we have in mind is always the race: whereas hitherto the central point has been the individual or the citizen. But this shifting in the point of view implies a revolution in ethics and politics. With the ancients, the maintenance of the existing generation was the main consideration, and patriotism its formula. To Marcus Aurelius, to the Stoics, as later to the Christians, the subject of all moral duties was the individual soul, and personal salvation became for centuries the corner-stone of the ethical structure. Well, all the speculation, all the doctrine, all the literature based upon that conception has become irrelevant and meaningless in the light of the new ideal. We no longer conceive the individual save as one in a chain of births. Fatherless, he is inconceivable; sonless, he is abortive. His soul, if he have one, is inseparable from its derivation from the past and its tradition to the future. His duty, his happiness, his value, are all bound up with the fact of paternity; and the same, mutatis mutandis, is true of women. The new generation in a word has a totally new code of ethics; and that code is directed to the end of the perfection of the race. For, and this is the second constituent of the modern view, the series of births is also the vehicle of progress. It is this discovery that gives to our outlook on life its exhilaration and zest. The ancients conceived the Golden Age as lying in the past; the men of the Middle Ages removed it to an imaginary heaven. Both in effect despaired of this world; and consequently their characteristic philosophy is that of the tub or the hermitage. So soon as the first flush of youth was past, pessimism clouded the civilization of Greece and of Rome; and from this Christianity escaped only to take refuge in an imaginary bliss beyond the grave. But we, by means of science, have established progress. We look to a future, a future assured, and a future in this world. Our eyes are on the coming generations; in them centres our hope and our duty. To feed them, to clothe them, to educate them, to make them better than ourselves, to do for them all that has hitherto been so scandalously neglected, and in doing it to find our own life and our own satisfaction--that is our task and our privilege, ours of the new generation.