The Investment of Influence: A Study of Social Sympathy and ServiceHillis, Newell Dwight
Philosophy
The Investment of Influence: A Study of Social Sympathy and Service
Hillis, Newell Dwight
Conduct of life
In the realm of law and liberty the best things ask for patience and
waiting. Out of nothing nothing comes. The institution that
represents little toil but little time endures. Man's early history is
involved in obscurity, largely because his early arts were
mushroomic--completed quickly, they quickly perished. The ideas
scratched upon the flat leaf or the thin reed represented scant labor
and therefore soon were dust. But he who holds in his hand a modern
book holds the fruitage of years many and long. For that book we see
the workmen ranging far for linen; we see the printer toiling upon his
movable types; we see the artist etching his plate; the author giving
his days to study and his nights to reflection; and because the book
harvests the study of a great man's lifetime it endures throughout
generations. The sciences also increase in value only as the time
spent upon them is lengthened. Few and brief were the days required
for the early astronomers to work out the theory that the earth is
flat, the sky a roof, the stars holes in which the gods have hung
lighted lamps. The theory that makes our earth sweep round the sun,
our sun sweep round a far-off star, all lesser groups sweep round one
central sun, that shepherds all the other systems, asks for the toil of
Galileo and Kepler, of Copernicus and Newton, and a great company of
modern students. The father of astronomy had to wait a thousand years
for the fruition of his science. Upon those words, called law or love,
or mother or king, man hath with patience labored. The word wife or
mother is so rich to-day as to make Homer's ideal, Helen, seem poor and
almost contemptible. The girl was very beautiful, but very painful the
alacrity with which she passes from the arms of Menelaus to the arms of
Paris, from the arms of Paris to those of Deiphobus, his conqueror. If
one hour only was required for this lovely creature to pack her
belongings preparatory to moving to the tent of her new lord, one day
fully sufficed for transferring her affections from one prince to
another. But, toiling ever upward to her physical beauty, woman added
mental beauty, moral beauty, until the word wife or mother or home came
to have almost infinite wealth of meaning.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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