there is no money in posterity. The germ-plasm has
infinite possibilities; but, so long as it remains germ-plasm, it can
write no cheques in our favour. If you serve the present, the present
will pay; posterity does not pay. If you write a "Merry Widow," the
present will pay; if you write an "Unfinished Symphony," you will be
dust ere it is performed. If you create that which will last forever,
but which makes no appeal to the transient tastes of the moment, you may
starve and die and rot, because the future, for which you work, cannot
reward you. Life is so constructed that only in our own day, and not
always now, is the mother--even Nature's own supreme organ of the
future--rewarded for her maternal sacrifice. Nature does not trouble
about the fate of the present, because she is always pressing on and
pressing on towards something more, higher, better. The present, the
individual, are but the organs of her purpose. We are to look upon
ourselves as ends in ourselves; but we are also means towards ends which
we can only dimly conceive, but towards which we may rightly work, and
the service of which, though by no means freedom in the ordinary sense,
is yet of that higher kind, that perfect freedom, which consists in the
development of all the higher attributes of our nature. For it is in our
nature to work and to feel and to live for the life that will be. That,
as I say, is because living creatures are so constructed.

Huxley said that if the present level of human life were to show no
rising in the future, he should welcome the kindly comet that should
sweep the whole thing away. None of us is content with things as they
are. If we are, better were it for us to be nourishing the grass and
serving the things that will be in that way, if we cannot in any other.
What promise, then, have we that things as they will be are worth
working for? We live now in an age to which there has been revealed the
fact of organic evolution. From the fire-mist, from the mud, from the
merely brutal, there have been evolved--such is the worth of Nature's
womb--there have been evolved intelligence and love, sacrifice, ideals;
splendours which no splendour to come can utterly dim. These things are
in the power of Nature. This is what "dead matter" can mother. So much
the worse for our contemptible conceptions of matter, and That of which
matter is the manifestation. But if it be that from the slime, by
natural processes, there can grow a St. Fr