BENEVOLENCE AND DISCIPLINE 153 



ercise of their respective sexual functions. They are 

 discoveries of the right ways and means to do things; 

 of enlarging their individual lives. But the creative 

 power of that Tightness lives in the records of the events, 

 and in the things discovered, or created. These ma- 

 terial symbols by means of which science, literature, 

 and art have grown; these libraries, monuments, and 

 instruments, which by themselves are but dead things, 

 waste pigments of nature-action, unmeaning shapes and 

 noises, in vital union with the hand and mind of .man, 

 are subtle agencies of spiritual conveyance in social life, 

 as man's organs are the instruments of his intelligence. 



The special value of this social heritage is in its 

 stability and democracy; in the fact that its elements are 

 not conserved in perishable protoplasmic form within 

 the narrow limits of parental bodies, or for the benefit 

 of their immediate offspring only. On the contrary, 

 they may have the strength and durability of stone or 

 steel and may be perpetually renovated by eliminations 

 and additions outside the living body of man. And so 

 far as they represent discoveries in constructive right- 

 ness, or truth, they are not exhausted, or impoverished, 

 by general usage, but multiplied thereby. 



But the highest creative powers of man, that is his 

 technical skill, his wisdom, and social vision, attain 

 their culmination toward the close of his sexual life, and 

 may endure beyond it into the period of his greatest 

 freedom of thought and action. This period of his 

 fullest development, which the narrow utilitarianism 

 of primitive life would minimize, or destroy, has been 

 unconsciously retrieved by a growing feeling of fellow 

 sympathy; by a purposeless and apparently wasteful 

 social benevolence which knew not the creative power 



