ant
touches the earth to recover his strength. History returns to the
people. After two thousand years, popular intelligence is again to be
revived. And under what new conditions? We live in a telescopic,
microscopic, telegraphic universe, all the elements of which are brought
together under the combined operation of fire and water, as erst, in
primitive Nature, vulcanic and plutonic forces struggled together in the
face of heaven and hell to form the earth. The long ranges of history
have left with us one definite idea: it is that of progress, the
intellectual passion of our time. All our science demonstrates it, all
our poetry sings it. Democracy is the last term of political progress.
Popular intelligence and virtue are the conditions of democracy. To
produce these is the mission of periodical literature. The vast
complexities of the world, all knowledge and all purpose, are being
reduced in the crucible of the popular mind to a common product.
Knowledge lives neither in libraries nor in rare minds, but in the
general heart. Great men are already mythical, and great ideas are
admitted only so far as we, the people, can see something in them. By no
great books or long treatises, but by a ceaseless flow of brevities and
repetitions, is the pulverized thought of the world wrought into the
soul. It is amazing how many significant passages in history and in
literature are reproduced in the essays of magazines and the leaders of
newspapers by allusion and illustration, and by constant iteration
beaten into the heads of the people. The popular mind is now feeding
upon and deriving tone from the best things that literary commerce can
produce from the whole world, past and present. There is no finer
example of the popularization of science than Agassiz addressing the
American people through the columns of a monthly magazine. Of the
popular heart which used to rumble only about once in a century the
newspapers are now the daily organs. They are creating an organic
general mind, the soil for future grand ideas and institutes. As the
soul reaches a higher stage in its destiny than ever before, the
scaffolding by which it has risen is to be thrown aside. The quality of
libraries is to be transferred to the soul. Spiritual life is now to
exert its influence directly, without the mechanism of letters,--is
going to exert itself through the social atmosphere,--and all history
and thought are to be perpetuated and to grow, not in books