That they do not move.
I take for a principle that all being is the infinitely serial, and that
whatever has been will, with differences of particulars, be again—
The last quarter of the fifteenth century—land to the west!
This first quarter of the twentieth century—we shall have revelations.
There will be data. There will be many. Behind this book, unpublished
collectively, or held as constituting its reserve forces, there are
other hundreds of data, but independently I take for a principle that
all existence is a flux and a re-flux, by which periods of expansion
follow periods of contraction; that few men can even think widely when
times are narrow times, but that human constrictions can not repress
extensions of thoughts and lives and enterprise and dominion when times
are wider times—so then that the pageantry of foreign coasts that was
revealed behind blank horizons after the year 1492, can not be, in the
course of development, the only astounding denial of seeming
vacancy—that the spirit, or the animation, and the stimulations and the
needs of the fifteenth century are all appearing again, and that
requital may appear again—
Aftermath of war, as in the year 1492: demands for readjustments;
crowded and restless populations, revolts against limitations,
intolerable restrictions against emigrations. The young man is no longer
urged, or is no longer much inclined, to go westward. He will, or must,
go somewhere. If directions alone no longer invite him, he may hear
invitation in dimensions. There are many persons, who have not
investigated for themselves, who think that both poles of this earth
have been discovered. There are too many women traveling luxuriously in
“Darkest Africa.” Eskimos of Disco, Greenland, are publishing a
newspaper. There must be outlet, or there will be explosion—