The stupendous acceleration after 1800 ended in 1900 with the
appearance of the new class of supersensual forces, before which
the man of science stood at first as bewildered and helpless as,
in the fourth century, a priest of Isis before the Cross of
Christ.
This, then, or something like this, would be a dynamic formula
of history. Any schoolboy knows enough to object at once that it
is the oldest and most universal of all theories. Church and
State, theology and philosophy, have always preached it,
differing only in the allotment of energy between nature and man.
Whether the attractive energy has been called God or Nature, the
mechanism has been always the same, and history is not obliged to
decide whether the Ultimate tends to a purpose or not, or whether
ultimate energy is one or many. Every one admits that the will is
a free force, habitually decided by motives. No one denies that
motives exist adequate to decide the will; even though it may not
always be conscious of them. Science has proved that forces,
sensible and occult, physical and metaphysical, simple and
complex, surround, traverse, vibrate, rotate, repel, attract,
without stop; that man's senses are conscious of few, and only in
a partial degree; but that, from the beginning of organic
existence, his consciousness has been induced, expanded, trained
in the lines of his sensitiveness; and that the rise of his
faculties from a lower power to a higher, or from a narrower to a
wider field, may be due to the function of assimilating and
storing outside force or forces.
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