er it this train of cities and institutions. Let us rise into another
idea: they will disappear. The Greek sculpture is all melted away, as if
it had been statues of ice; here and there a solitary figure or fragment
remaining, as we see flecks and scraps of snow left in cold dells and
mountain clefts in June and July. For the genius that created it creates
now somewhat else. The Greek letters last a little longer, but are
already passing under the same sentence and tumbling into the inevitable
pit which the creation of new thought opens for all that is old. The new
continents are built out of the ruins of an old planet; the new races
fed out of the decomposition of the foregoing. New arts destroy the old.
See the investment of capital in aqueducts made useless by hydraulics;
fortifications, by gunpowder; roads and canals, by railways; sails, by
steam; steam by electricity.

You admire this tower of granite, weathering the hurts of so many ages.
Yet a little waving hand built this huge wall, and that which builds is
better than that which is built. The hand that built can topple it down
much faster. Better than the hand and nimbler was the invisible thought
which wrought through it; and thus ever, behind the coarse effect, is a
fine cause, which, being narrowly seen, is itself the effect of a finer
cause. Every thing looks permanent until its secret is known. A rich
estate appears to women a firm and lasting fact; to a merchant, one
easily created out of any materials, and easily lost. An orchard, good
tillage, good grounds, seem a fixture, like a gold mine, or a river, to
a citizen; but to a large farmer, not much more fixed than the state
of the crop. Nature looks provokingly stable and secular, but it has
a cause like all the rest; and when once I comprehend that, will these
fields stretch so immovably wide, these leaves hang so individually
considerable? Permanence is a word of degrees. Every thing is medial.
Moons are no more bounds to spiritual power than bat-balls.

The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look,
he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his
facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new
idea which commands his own. The life of man is a self-evolving circle,
which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to
new and larger circles, and that without end. The extent to which this
generation of circles, wheel witho