Page:Occult Japan - Lovell.djvu/332

310 largely creatures of instinct. For under a better name this instinct is nothing but a subtler part of the instinct of self-preservation, the instinctive holding to all that makes for our individuality and the like antagonism to all that threatens it. Materially, this prejudice in favor of ourselves is now conceded to be misleading; yet it still survives immaterially, that is psychically, in our unnatural divorce between brain and mind. For not to have them two makes us one with all the rest of the universe. Whether we suppose mind to be matter or matter mind, we become in either case part and parcel of the material world; and so tenaciously, though unconsciously, do we hold to our supposed superiority to the rest of the universe, that we refuse to recognize the relationship. We are very loath to admit that we are kin to stocks and stones and other reputed senseless things. This is the gist of the whole matter. Thought we deem to be something grand, while chemical action strikes us as ignoble; although the one is every whit as inscrutably potent as the other. It is because we really know nothing about the essence of either that we dare decide so