Page:Psychology and preaching.djvu/212

 194 PSYCHOLOGY AND PREACHING

achievement, but the forecasting and planning will not cease.

With the extension of experience and the accumulation of ideas in which that is treasured, with the growth of the con structive imagination, which, from the psychological point of view, is the main line of human development, man projects his life more and more consciously, more and more definitely and with ever-increasing energy into the future, and strives to control its development according to definite plans, and with increasing success. As the future becomes the past, the plans undergo continual modification ; but nor mally they do not contract but expand and take in further stretches of the future. This is true of individual expe rience and also of collective life. As a man s personality develops he realizes more keenly that his individuality is a thread in the whole cloth of human destiny which is being woven upon the loom of the ages. He identifies himself more completely with the whole past, the whole present and the whole future of humanity and this lengthens his per spective, in every direction. His consciousness becomes a focal point of light which penetrates the veil of darkness that shrouds the things that have been and illuminates with steadier and stronger beams the track along which he is moving into the things that are to be. But in the future his interest is more and more definitely located as his develop ment proceeds, and the past and the present, in the last analysis, claim his attention chiefly because of their pos sible bearing upon that contingent part of his destiny which lies ahead of him.

Now, voluntary action is that which is directed toward a consciously conceived or imaged end. The forecast of the future is its motive. We might say that instead of being pushed or driven from behind, the voluntary actor is drawn from before ; but then we should be reminded that the idea of the end at which his action is aimed is a fact of present experience, that we cannot really experience the future, which by its very nature lies wholly beyond experience;

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