There is something
in them that you do not find in other eyes, and you have read the
life of the man when you have divined what it is. Let the thing
serve as a figure. So ought alert interest in the world of men
and thought to serve each one of us that we shall have the quick
perceiving vision, taking meanings at a glance, reading
suggestions as if they were expositions. You shall not otherwise
get full value of your humanity. What good shall it do you else
that the long generations of men which have gone before have
filled the world with great store of everything that may make you
wise and your life various? Will you not take the usury of the
past, if it may be had for the taking? Here is the world humanity
has made: will you take full citizenship in it, or will you live
in it as dull, as slow to receive, as unenfranchised, as the
idlers for whom civilization has no uses, or the deadened
toilers, men or beasts, whose labor shuts the door on choice?
That man seems to me a little less than human who lives as if our
life in the world were but just begun, thinking only of the
things of sense, recking nothing of the infinite thronging and
assemblage of affairs the great stage over, or of the old wisdom
that has ruled the world.
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