Mankind was slow to reach into the unknown. The unknown--"the undiscover'd country from whose bourn no traveller returns"--was the realm of death and devils. Sensible men would plot their adventures on maps of the familiar.
p5
All this helps us understand why Columbus was a discoverer and not an explorer. The crucial distinction between these two roles we can see in the origins of our English words. The etymology of the word "discover" is obvious. Its primary meaning is to uncover, or to disclose to view. The discoverer, then, is a finder. He shows us what he already knew was there. Columbus set out to "discover," to find, the westward oceanic route to Asia. Of course he knew the ocean, and he knew of Asia. He set out to find the way. The word "explore" has quite different connotations. Appropriately, too, it has a disputed etymology. Some say it comes from ex (out) and plorare (from pluere, to flow). Either etymology reminds us that the explorer is one who surprises (and so makes people cry out) or one who makes new knowledge flow out.
The dicoverer simply uncovers, but the explorer opens. The discoverer concludes a search; he is a finder. The explorer begins a search; he is a seeker. And he opens the way for other seekers.
p6
The great innovation in English philosophy in that first age of American settlement was John Locke's appeal to experience. His interesting suggestion could be summed up in the notation that at birth every man's mind was an American. The human mind, he said, was a tabula rasa--a blank sheet--on which the facts of life could inscribe their record, so making experience into knowledge.
p10
A simple way of explaining what made this new kind of community adventure possible was that Englishmen now had the Power to Leap. The sea was their floating medium, and the sizable vessels of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were their flying machines. Crossing the sea had become a vastly different experience from crossing the land.
...
The sea was wonderfully empty. That cultural emptiness (like the American Void) would help explain much that would be possible in America. The enormous unpeopled Ocean Vacuum would become a precondition for revealing new possibilities in English institutions, for allowing whole communities to become explorers of an American unknown.
...
A trek of comparable length across any landscape would have been incomparably more enriching or contaminating.
p14
When before had there been so intimate, so extensive, so vivid a confrontation of two such disparate stages of human development? When before had there been such communities of explorers, men joined together to discover new possibilities in the unknown.
This encounter between disparate epochs and disparate civilizations was an example of a Fertile Verge. For a verge, in my vocabular of world history, is a boundary between anything and anything else--including, of course, the boundary between the known and the unknown, the familiar and the strange. This is the place where new ideas and new institutions grow, where new opportunities appear, where commerce in products and thought can flourish. A verge is a kind of landscape--of the earth or of the mind--the makes every man and woman willy-nilly into an explorer.
p17
Even before the airplane, the automobile had a similar atomizing effect. Traveling by train had been a social experience. In the nineteenth century, the characteristic open design of American railroad cars--unlike the closed compartments of the British or the continental cars--developed out of the Americans' desire to move about and mix with fellow passengers.
...
But the automobile was isolating and encapsulating. The American traveling to work by car was apt to be traveling alone, probably listening to his radio for music or news from some distant center.
...
This vast ocean of superhighways was nearly as free of culture as the sea traversed by the Mayflower Pilgrims.
p62
While philosophers describe the "present" as nothing more than a fleeting moment, in common experience we cannot help feeling that the present has dimensions. As the Irish poet Thomas Moore observed, the present is "A narrow isthmus 'twixt two boundless seas, The past, the future, two eternities.
Many facts of life--including our technology--make the isthmus of the present seem either narrow or wide. How we see the present depends on the reach and sharpness and vividness of our vision.
p69
The rise of science was also a new recognition of the extent of the unknown... Newton wrote "I do know know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now an then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."
p87
Modern science was born in man's vision of this ocean of ignorance. It was born in the Exploring Spirit. The great scientists were also Negative Discoverers. They helped mankind see how little was yet known. They pointed the way to new Americas of the mind, realms of ignorance never before imagined to be there.
p88
"Knowledge," as George Santayana observed, "is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not am embrace." Any awakening to another area or another dimension of our ignorance is what I call a Negative Discovery. It enlarges our self-awareness. The so-called "Discovery" of America--the modern parable of the Exploring Spirit--is my prototype of Negative Discovery.
p90
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a new tradition emerged in the American press. Compounded of conscience, imagination, ambition, and original sin, it was the product of the "Muckrakers." These ran the gamut from serious writers like Ida M. Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens at one end to scores of petty, reckless, self-seeking, self-righteous newspaper gossips at the other. The best of them were explorers. Their service was perhaps less in bringing reliable new information than in awakening the citizenry to vast areas to national life that were still unexplored.
p97