As Portugal ventured out into the world in the early fifteenth century—and for nearly a century this meant almost exclusively the world of Africa—its people were among the first to make another conceptual leap. They began to think of discovery not merely as the simple act of stumbling upon assorted novelties or arriving wide-eyed in never-before-visited places, but rather as something new and more abstract. Discovery became a mind-set and this would become another cornerstone of modernism; it meant understanding that the world was infinite in its social complexity, and this required a
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