Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/365



seeks to be other than what it is. The stone strives for the center of the earth, and the earth itself is ever seeking new positions. The river flows to the sea, and the sea ebbs and flows to lunar influences. At a glance out upon the world all things appear fixed, but a little reflection shows that we live in a seeking, searching, surging world. Nothing rests behind the limitations imposed upon it. A thing is what it is because it has in it a principle which tends to make that thing other than what it is. As the magnet so everything exists in and through polarity,—in a tension between the present manifestation of the thing and the potency which destroys the present for a new realization.

Man is the most intensified form of this polarity. He is a "restless, seething, stormy sea." It is utterly impossible for him to rest content in any condition of life. Carlyle says that all the ministers and confectioners and upholsterers of Europe cannot make one bootblack happy. Sure enough, for the bootblack is alive, and the law of life is that another condition of life be perpetually sought. The Prince of Abyssinia could not rest content in the Happy Valley, although the king supplied every wish of the heart as soon as it could be known. The Prince tunneled out into the boundless world without, as everyone must tunnel out of every present self into the infinite self which lies beyond.

But while the mountain strives upward, and the clod "feels a stir of might," and in the dragon fly an "inner impulse rends the veil of the old husk," we have so far only the blind urgency for better things. In man the infinite striving becomes a conscious process. He recognizes the duality in his nature, and projects his ideal, potential self as the guide, motive and law of life. With the immature there may be only a vague longing "for a good comprehended not," but man, as a rational being, Rh