With science or with society, he had no quarrel and
claimed no share of authority. He had never been able to acquire
knowledge, still less to impart it; and if he had, at times, felt
serious differences with the American of the nineteenth century,
he felt none with the American of the twentieth. For this new
creation, born since 1900, a historian asked no longer to be
teacher or even friend; he asked only to be a pupil, and promised
to be docile, for once, even though trodden under foot; for he
could see that the new American -- the child of incalculable
coal-power, chemical power, electric power, and radiating energy,
as well as of new forces yet undetermined -- must be a sort of
God compared with any former creation of nature. At the rate of
progress since 1800, every American who lived into the year 2000
would know how to control unlimited power. He would think in
complexities unimaginable to an earlier mind. He would deal with
problems altogether beyond the range of earlier society. To him
the nineteenth century would stand on the same plane with the
fourth -- equally childlike -- and he would only wonder how both
of them, knowing so little, and so weak in force, should have
done so much. Perhaps even he might go back, in 1964, to sit with
Gibbon on the steps of Ara Coeli.
Meanwhile he was getting education.
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