文档介绍：A TREATISE ON PARENTS AND CHILDREN
A TREATISE ON
PARENTS AND
CHILDREN
BY BERNARD SHAW
1
A TREATISE ON PARENTS AND CHILDREN
Trailing Clouds of Glory
Childhood is a stage in the process of that continual remanufacture of
the Life Stuff by which the human race is perpetuated. The Life Force
either will not or cannot achieve immortality except in very anisms:
indeed it is by no means ascertained that even the amoeba is immortal.
Human beings visibly wear out, though they last longer than their friends
the dogs. Turtles, parrots, and elephants are believed to be capable of
outliving the memory of the oldest human inhabitant. But the fact that
new ones are born conclusively proves that they are not immortal. Do
away with death and you do away with the need for birth: in fact if you
went on breeding, you would finally have to kill old people to make room
for young ones.
Now death is not necessarily a failure of energy on the part of the Life
Force. People with no imagination try to make things which will last for
ever, and even want to live for ever themselves. But the intelligently
imaginative man knows very well that it is waste of labor to make a
machine that will last ten years, because it will probably be superseded in
half that time by an improved machine answering the same purpose. He
also knows that if some devil were to convince us that our dream of
personal immortality is no dream but a hard fact, such a shriek of despair
would go up from the human race as no other conceivable horror could
provoke. With all our perverse nonsense as to John Smith living for a
thousand million eons and for ever after, we die voluntarily, knowing that
it is time for us to be scrapped, to be remanufactured, e back, as
Wordsworth divined, trailing ever brightening clouds of glory. We must
all be born again, and yet again and again. We should like to live a little
longer just as we should like 50 pounds: that is, we should take it if we
could get