facts, the vocation to service, to beauty, to truth. A fact, then,
which must control our view of personal self-discipline, of education,
and of social effort: since it refers to the abiding Reality which alone
gives all these their meaning and worth, and which man, consciously or
unconsciously, must pursue.

And last, if we ask as a summing up of the whole matter: _Why_ man is
thus to seek the Eternal, through, behind and within the ever-fleeting?
The answer is that he cannot, as a matter of fact, help doing it sooner
or later: for his heart is never at rest, till it finds itself there.
But he often wastes a great deal of time before he realizes this. And
perhaps we may find the reason why man--each man--is thus pressed
towards some measure of union with Reality, in the fact that his
conscious will thus only becomes an agent of the veritable purposes of
life: of that Power which, in and through mankind, conserves and slowly
presses towards realization the noblest aspirations of each soul. This
power and push we may call if we like in the language of realism the
tendency of our space-time universe towards deity; or in the language of
religion, the working of the Holy Spirit. And since, so far as we know,
it is only in man that life becomes self-conscious, and ever more and
more self-conscious, with the deepening and widening of his love and his
thought; so it is only in man that it can dedicate the will and desire
which are life's central qualities to the furtherance of this Divine
creative aim.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 149: "The Mirror of Eternal Salvation," Cap. 7.]

[Footnote 150: A good general discussion in Tansley: "The New Psychology