ut wheel, will go, depends on the
force or truth of the individual soul. For it is the inert effort
of each thought, having formed itself into a circular wave of
circumstance,--as for instance an empire, rules of an art, a local
usage, a religious rite,--to heap itself on that ridge and to solidify
and hem in the life. But if the soul is quick and strong it bursts over
that boundary on all sides and expands another orbit on the great deep,
which also runs up into a high wave, with attempt again to stop and to
bind. But the heart refuses to be imprisoned; in its first and narrowest
pulses, it already tends outward with a vast force and to immense and
innumerable expansions.

Every ultimate fact is only the first of a new series. Every general law
only a particular fact of some more general law presently to disclose
itself. There is no outside, no inclosing wall, no circumference to us.
The man finishes his story,--how good! how final! how it puts a new face
on all things! He fills the sky. Lo! on the other side rises also a man
and draws a circle around the circle we had just pronounced the outline
of the sphere. Then already is our first speaker not man, but only a
first speaker. His only redress is forthwith to draw a circle outside of
his antagonist. And so men do by themselves. The result of to-day, which
haunts the mind and cannot be escaped, will presently be abridged into
a word, and the principle that seemed to explain nature will itself be
included as one example of a bolder generalization. In the thought of
to-morrow there is a power to upheave all thy creed, all the creeds, all
the literatures of the nations, and marshal thee to a heaven which no
epic dream has yet depicted. Every man is not so much a workman in the
world as he is a suggestion of that he should be. Men walk as prophecies
of the next age.

Step by step we scale this mysterious ladder: the steps are actions; the
new prospect is power. Every several result is threatened and judged by
that which follows. Every one seems to be contradicted by the new; it is
only limited by the new. The new statement is always hated by the old,
and, to those dwelling in the old, comes like an abyss of scepticism.
But the eye soon gets wonted to it, for the eye and it are effects of
one cause; then its innocency and benefit appear, and presently, all
its energy spent, it pales and dwindles before the revelation of the new
hour.

Fear not the new generalization. Do