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 should be taken in bulk. They take it, some of them, a solid hundred years of it or so, and gulp it down. The advantage of prophecy is that it cannot be taken as a solid by people who would take everything so if they could. Prophecy is protected. People have to breathe it, assimilate it, and get it into their circulation and make a solid out of it personally, and do it all themselves. It is this process which is making our modern men spiritual, interpretative, and powerful toward the present and toward the past, and which is giving a body and soul to knowledge, and is making knowledge lively and human, the kind of knowledge (when men get it) that makes things happen. CHAPTER IX THE CROWD'S IMAGINATION ABOUT PEOPLE I would like to propose, as a basis for the judgment of men and events, and as a basis for forecasting the next men and next events, and arriving at a vision of action, a Theory of the World. Every man has one. Every man one knows can be seen doing his work in this world on a great background, a kind of panorama or stage setting in his mind, made up of history and books, newspapers, people, and experiences, which might be called his Theory of the World. It is his theory of the world which makes him what he is--his personal judgment or personal interpretation of what the world is like, and what works in it, and what does not work.