The Course of Human Events

by David McCullough

no one ever lived in the past. Washington, Jefferson, John Adams, and their contemporaries didn’t walk about saying, “Isn’t this fascinating living in the past! Aren’t we picturesque in our funny clothes!” They lived in the present. The difference is it was their present, not ours.

But what did they, the Founders, mean by the expression “pursuit of happiness”? It didn’t mean long vacations or material possessions or ease. As much as anything it meant the life of the mind and spirit. It meant education and the love of learning, the liberty to think for oneself.

One crystal night, in 1756, twenty years before the Declaration of Independence, he stood beneath a sky full of stars, “thrown into a kind of transport.” He knew such wonders of the heavens to be the gifts of God, he wrote, but greatest of all was the gift of an inquiring mind. But all the provisions that He has [made] for the gratification of our senses . . . are much inferior to the provision, the wonderful provision, that He has made for the gratification of our nobler powers of intelligence and reason. He has given us reason to find out the truth, and the real design and true end of our existence.