By and by he gets tired of lying on his back. DISCONTENT with
his condition makes him wriggle and wriggle. At last he succeeds
in turning over.

If he were contented then, there would be no men on earth--only
huge babies. But DISCONTENT again seizes him, and through
discontent he learns to crawl.

Crawling--travelling on hands and knees--satisfied lower forms of
animal life. It used to satisfy us, in the old days of early
evolutionary stages.

But the human infant--thanks to inborn cravings--is DISCONTENTED
with crawling. With much trouble and risk and many feeble
totterings, he learns to walk erect. He gets up into a position
that takes his eyes off the ground. He is able to look at the
sun and stars and takes the position of a man. DISCONTENT is his
mainspring at every stage. ----

What discontent does in the limited life of a child, it does on a
much larger scale in the life of a man--and on a scale still
larger in the life of a race.

You can always tell when a man has reached the limit of his
possible development. He ceases to be discontented--or at least
to show discontent actively.

Contentment, apathy, are signs of decadence and of a career ended
in either a man or a nation.