e old.[695] 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. Everything looks permanent until its
secret is known. A rich estate appears to women and children 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,[696]
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 without 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;[697] in its first and narrowest pulses it
already tends outward with a vast force and to immense and innumerable
expansions