In the former days, the strength of a man, or of an estate, or a business, was its stability.  In the new world, instead of stability, we have the idea of persistence, and power lies not so much in solid brittle foundation quality as in conductivity.  Socially, men can be divided into conductors—­men who connect powers—­and non-conductors—­men who do not; and power lies in persistence, in dogged flexibility, adaptableness, and impressionableness.  The set conservative class of people, in three hundred years, are going to be the dreamers, inventors—­those who demonstrate their capacity to dream true, and who hit shrewdly upon probabilities and trends and futures; and the power of a man is coming to be the power of observing atmospheres, of being sensitive to the intangible and the unknown.  People are more likely to be crucified two thousand years from now for wanting to stay as they are.  There used to be the inertia of rest; and now in its place, working reciprocally in a new astonishing equilibrium, we step up calmly on our vast moving sidewalk of civilization and swing into the inertia of motion.

The inertia of men, instead of being that of foundations, conventions, customs, facts, sogginess, and heaviness, is getting to be an inertia now toward the future, or the next-thing-to-do.  Most of us can prove this by simply looking inward and taking a glimpse of our own consciousness.  Let a man draw up before his own mind the contents of his own consciousness (if he has a motor consciousness), and we find that the future in his life looms up, both in its motives and its character, and takes about three quarters of the room of his consciousness; and when it is not looming up, it is woven into everything he does.  Even if all the future were for was to help one understand the present and act this immediate moment as one should, nine tenths of the power of seeing a thing as it is, turns out to be one’s power of seeing it as it is going to be.  In any normal man’s life, it is really the future and his sense of the future that make his present what it is.

History is losing its monopoly.  It is only absorbed in men’s minds—­in the minds of those who are making more of it—­in parts or rather in elements of all its parts.

The trouble with history seems to have been, thus far, that people have been under the illusion that history should be taken as a solid.  They seem to think it should be taken in bulk.  They take it, some of them, a solid hundred years of it or so, and gulp it down.  The advantage of prophecy is that it cannot be taken as a solid by people who would take everything so if they could.  Prophecy is protected.  People have to breathe it, assimilate it, and get it into their circulation and make a solid out of it personally, and do it all themselves.  It is this process which is making our modern men spiritual, interpretative, and powerful toward the present and toward the past, and which is giving a body and soul to knowledge, and is making knowledge lively and human, the kind of knowledge (when men get it) that makes things happen.