103. Remember, therefore, that it is of the very highest importance that you should know what you _are_, and determine to be the best that you may be; but it is of no importance whatever, except as it may contribute to that end, to know what you have been. Whether your Creator shaped you with fingers, or tools, as a sculptor would a lump of clay, or gradually raised you to manhood through a series of inferior forms, is only of moment to you in this respect--that in the one case you cannot expect your children to be nobler creatures than you are yourselves--in the other, every act and thought of your present life may be hastening the advent of a race which will look back to you, their fathers (and you ought at least to have attained the dignity of desiring that it may be so,) with incredulous disdain. 104. But that you _are_ yourselves capable of that disdain and dismay; that you are ashamed of having been apes, if you ever were so; that you acknowledge, instinctively, a relation of better and worse, and a law respecting what is noble and base, which makes it no question to you that the man is worthier than the baboon,--_this_ is a fact of infinite significance. This law of preference in your hearts is the true essence of your being, and the consciousness of that law is a more positive existence than any dependent on the coherence or forms of matter. 105. Now, but a few words more of mythology, and I have done. Remember that Athena holds the weaver's shuttle, not merely as an instrument of _texture_, but as an instrument of _picture_; the ideas of clothing, and of the warmth of life, being thus inseparably connected with those of graphic beauty, and the brightness of life. I have told you that no art could be recovered among us without perfectness in dress, nor without the elementary graphic art of women, in divers colors of needlework. There has been no nation of any art-energy, but has strenuously occupied and interested itself in this household picturing, from the web of Penelope to the tapestry of Queen Matilda, and the meshes of Arras and Gobelins. 106. We should then naturally ask what kind of embroidery Athena put on her own robe; "[Greek: peplon heanon, poikilon, hon r' aute poiesato kai kame chersin]." The subject of that [Greek: poikilia] of hers, as you know, was the war of the giants and gods. Now the real name of these giants, remember, is that used by Hesiod, '[Greek: pelogonoi],' 'mud-begotten,' and the meaning of the contest between these and Zeus, [Greek: pelogonon elater], is, again, the inspiration of life into the clay, by the goddess of breath; and the actual confusion going on visibly before you, daily, of the earth, heaping itself into cumbrous war with the powers above it.