Graduation Thesis

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Excerpt from Graduation Thesis: Submitted to the Faculty of Arts of McGill College, in Accordance With the Statutes of Mc@gill University, MontrealThe story of a life must be interesting, but the history of an idea has a manifold interest, because it is the story of many lives. It is the history of life as it is ever springing into being, ever handed on from one individual to another, gathering the vigour of many ages. Men are not solitary units whose history must be a collection of independent chapters, but they are a long line of heirs, each generation of whom inherits the mental wealth of its predecessors, and may squander the treasures or may multiply them many times.Students of merely material organisms have begun in these later days to wonder whether the Creator's plan for filling this world with life may not include some law ordaining that one generation shall hand down to its successor a more highly developed material constitution than it received from its predecessor. Such a hypothesis is but a tardy re¿ection of the laws which psychologists have known for many cen turies. For it is a very old doctrine, and a truth long known, that souls advance in refinement, in adaptations, and in adaptability. We may hand down to our children a higher spiritual organism than we received from our fathers.Now, as the subjective organism may advance, so also may objective spiritual possessions be increased. The child grows daily more familiar with the intellectual possessions of the father, with the wealth of know ledge which the father gained by hard toil. The child may inherit all this wealth more easily and surely than wealth of gold, and in his turn he may amass new stores, multiplying, deepening, widening, refining what he received, proceeding easily to new discoveries on the basis of the old, to new applications, which had seemed utterly impossible to the father.The inherited ideas become the long connecting threads for many successive generations of individuals. The thoughts of men become the warp on which the history of the race is woven. We lose almost entirely the strong interest which sometimes chains us so subtly to stories of individuals when we begin to study the history of a nation, of a race, of a great chain of living links, where each soul moves and works as an independent self, while nevertheless all the units are intimately de pendent, each an all who live about it, and on all who came before it.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.