That I may begin with this generally intelligible example--what
noble-minded man does not wish and aspire to repeat his own life in
better wise in his children and, again, in their children, and still
to continue to live upon this earth, ennobled and perfected in their
lives, long after he is dead; to wrest from mortality the spirit,
the mind, and the character with which in his day he perchance put
perversity and corruption to flight, established uprightness, aroused
sluggishness, and uplifted dejection, and to deposit these, as his
best legacy to posterity, in the spirits of his survivors, in order
that, in their turn, they may again bequeath them equally adorned and
augmented? What noble-minded man does not wish, by act or thought,
to sow a seed for the infinite and eternal perfecting of his race;
to cast into Time something new and hitherto non-existent, which
may abide there and become the unfailing source of new creations;
to repay, for his place on this earth and for the short span of
life vouchsafed him, something that shall last forever even here on
earth--to the end that he as an individual, even though unnamed by
history (since thirst for fame is contemptible vanity), may leave
behind in his own consciousness and in his own belief manifest tokens
that he himself existed? What noble-minded man does not wish this,
I asked; yet the world is to be considered as organized only in
accordance with the requirements of those who thus view themselves as
the norm of how all men should be.
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