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Scalawag on the Web Sectory 15
Page 12
Naturally, when one has before one the prospect of leaving this world at any moment, and one is working under a severe mental strain, one generally thinks deeply of one's beloved parents and relatives. Thus my father, mother and sister were before me all the time in my imagination. Sometimes when I was half-dazed I could see them so vividly that I could almost believe they were so close that I could touch them. I never thought that I should see them again, in reality, although I never actually lost hope of doing so; but I was thinking incessantly of them, and of the anxiety I was causing them, as I had had no possible way of communicating with them for months and months.
This is a wonderful age in many respects. In none, however, more wonderful than in the wide-spread diffusion of knowledge. The ordinary people now understand more of nature's secrets than the wise men of old. They are to-day interested in researches that a former generation would have relegated to the scholar and the man of leisure. No department of knowledge is retained for the researches of a favored few. The farmer, the mechanic, and the man of business are alike interested in a knowledge of prehistoric times. The rude implements of the past appeal to the curiosity of all. We arise from a study of the past with clearer ideas of man's destiny. Impressed with the great advancement in man's condition from the rude savagery of the drift, to the enlightened civilization of to-day, what may we not hope the advancement will be during the countless ages we believe a beneficent Providence has in store for his creature, man?
So far as law and religion will not account for the varieties of social behaviour, the novice may most conveniently consider them under the head of morals. The forms of social intercourse, the fashions, the festivities, are imposed on us by our fellows from without, and none the less effectively because as a general rule we fall in with them as a matter of course. The difference between manners and morals of the higher order is due simply to the more pressing need, in the case of our most serious duties, of a reflective sanction, a "moral sense," to break us in to the common service. It is no easy task to keep legal and religious penalties or rewards out of the reckoning, when trying to frame an estimate of what the notions of right and wrong, prevalent in a given society, amount to in themselves; nevertheless, it is worth doing, and valuable collections of material exist to aid the work. The facts about education, which even amongst rude peoples is often carried on far into manhood, throw much light on this problem. So do the moralizings embodied the traditional lore of the folk--the proverbs, the beast-fables, the stories of heroes.
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