Conclusion.

That inheritance moves. Some of it changes with its time; some of it holds across every time. Which parts move and which parts hold, the institution does not yet claim to know. It is still learning them, and it expects to be learning them for as long as it publishes. This paper is therefore not a final thesis. It is an ongoing work. It will grow, it will be corrected, and later editions will reach positions this one did not. What will not change is the heart of it: the commitment to look beneath the surface, and to stand behind every gesture set down.

There is a reason to trust that the heart holds. If creativity has a soul, that soul is a form of energy, and energy is governed by law. The conservation of energy states that energy is never created and never destroyed; it is only transferred from one form into another. Motion is governed by a conservation of the same kind. The law of momentum, set down by Isaac Newton in the Principia, holds that within a system that no outside force enters, the total momentum does not change: momentum, the product of a body's mass and its velocity, is neither created within the system nor lost from it, but only passed from one body to another (Newton, 1687).

In the world there is always motion, and there is always inertia, the tendency of what moves to keep moving until a force meets it. A work of design is a body in motion. It carries the momentum of every experience that shaped it, and it transfers that momentum to whoever receives it; the maker does not create the heart of the work and cannot destroy it, but only carries it forward. This paper is such a body. It holds the momentum of all that was looked at and lived in order to write it, and inertia is the assurance that it does not now come to rest. It will go on, and it will grow.

The heart it carries was never the institution's to invent.

It was the institution's to receive, to hold with care, and to pass on.