Time hath endless rarities, and shows of all varieties; which reveals old things in heaven, makes new discoveries in earth, and even earth itself a discovery. _Sir Thomas Browne_.
The green leaf of the tree, the blade of the wheat that gives me bread—I look at them and tell myself, as many a man has told himself before, that if I could read their secrets I should know, as from the 'flower in the crannied wall,' 'what God and man is.' So I might, but only as far as their secrets go. If I could read my own I should go farther and know more. I am man and hold far greater secrets in being man. And I have the inestimable advantage of being inside myself, of being alive, besides looking on at living, of both growing and watching growth. There is no other live creature on earth who can possibly tell me as much as I can tell myself about what it means to be alive. And if the blade of wheat is wonderful beyond words, what am I?
Think of it: I have a history; indeed I am a history, I am time alive, time that accumulates and lasts. I have a past that is not past, because it is at work in my present and is writing its indelible signature on my future. There is no least action in my past that has not left its impress on me, made me different from what I should have been without it, and therefore will make my future different too. My whole history is alive, active and changing in my actions and my change. The history of my forefathers, too, is alive in me and in my character and powers. I have an inheritance from their living; I am as and what I am, in part because they were as and what they were. But I have power and I use it to create myself and recreate my inheritance through an impetus transmitted to me in the transmission to me of my life. Therefore every moment of my life is a unique and original moment of a unique and original history, mine and mine alone, never to be repeated, never to be wholly predicted, even by me. The evolutionist philosophy tells me that I endure, I _last_, and that all my changes and experiences endure, last, in and with me, changing in themselves and among themselves as though they were alive to influence and interpenetrate each other. Indeed they are alive in me and in my life or they could not endure. They would pass like the stages in the height of a sand heap as it grows, as the little heap it was is merged and lost in the larger heap it is. They would be lost as the flowing tide is lost when the ebb succeeds it. Such changes are mere successions, displacements and replacements; they are not history. They enter history only in sharing that of the universe which itself endures, lasts, and within which they are parts.