o put in the coupling between this world and the next.

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