Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 78.djvu/478

468 forward impulse, an effort, a ceaseless striving, a will to produce always a more perfect form, a better function. It is this tropic, restless, aspiring force, this psychic factor of progress, that prompts us evermore to invent a new way, a shorter cut, a better method, and leads to the steady and inevitable raising of moral and political standards. To speak of this factor as a "force" or "energy" is merely to use a category taken from material science. To say that it is "teleological" and works towards "ideals" is to interpret it in terms of narrow human experience. It matters little what we call it, but if we call it "mind" or "soul," it suggests no longer a "substance," no static quantity, nor yet just the sum total of our conscious life—but rather a sort of bubbling spring, a profound source, from which upwells the entire organic world, culminating now in the whole mass of human achievement and aspiring to some ever higher conscious or unconscious goal.