Progress Unfinished
Learning and growth build on past knowledge, never feeling final or complete.
To the end of his life, the student whose frame remains unshaken, writes on morals and history, on science and on fine art, and his inquiries in all the departments of nature are marked by as keen and strenuous an enthusiasm as when in his youth he traversed the hills and the valleys on foot. Each process becomes but a basis for higher ones; and each successful and wide research but opens the path to new discoveries. As the skiff which the boy builds grows at last to the steamship, and the hut of the pioneer to the palace which the citizen rears and adorns--while yet neither of these is felt to be final with him, or adequate to the highest conception he can form--so the thought of the child expands and accumulates to the science of manhood, and still is admitted insufficient and transient.
— RICHARD S. STORRS