Now, it is in terms of this latter kind of progress that our duty to the past, as we conceive it, may be defined. And in its terms also must we define the grounds of our veneration for the past. None of us invented language, spoken or written; nor yet numbers, nor the wheel, nor much else. We see further than our ancestors because we stand upon their shoulders, and, as Coleridge hinted, this may be so even though we be dwarfs and they were giants. Some of us see this. How can we fail to do so? And the past becomes in our eyes a very real thing, to which we are so greatly indebted that we should even live for it. But there is a great danger, dependent upon a great error, here. Let us consider what is our right attitude towards the past. We are its children and its heirs. We are infinitely indebted to it. We must love and venerate that which was lovable and venerable in it. But are we to live for it? If we could imagine ourselves coming from afar and contemplating the sequence of universal phenomena now for the first time, we should realize that the past, though real, because it was once real, is yet a fleeting aspect of change, and, in a very real sense also, _is_ not. Nor, indeed, _is_ the future; but it will be. We cannot alter, we cannot benefit, we cannot serve the past, because it is not and will not be. Our besetting tendency as individuals is to live for our own pasts, more especially as we grow old; to become retrospective, to cease to look forward, even to dedicate what remains to us of life to the service of what is not at all. In this respect, as in so many others, we are less wise than children. We will not let the dead bury its dead. This is also the tendency of all institutions. Even if there were founded an Institute of the Future, dedicated to the life of this world to come, after only one generation its administrators would be consulting the interests of the past, turning to the service of the name and the memory of their founder, though it was for the future that he lived. Throughout all our social institutions we can perceive this same worship of what no longer is at the cost of the most real of all real things, which is the life of the generation that is and the generations that are to be. Everywhere the price for this idolatry is exacted. The perpetual image of it is Lot's wife, who, looking backwards upon that from which she had escaped, was turned into a pillar of salt. Nature may or may not have a purpose, and exhibit designs for that purpose; she may or may not, in philosophical language, be teleological. Man is and must be teleological. We must live for the morrow, for what will be, whether as individuals or as a nation, or our ways are the ways of death. This is looked upon as a human failing--that man never is, but always to be blest; that man is never satisfied, that he will not rest content with present achievement.