Page:Personality (Lectures delivered in America).djvu/107

Rh own creation and, unlike animals, he is born naked and has to create his own clothes. This proves that man has been born from the world of nature's purpose to the world of freedom.

For creation is freedom. It is a prison, to have to live in what is; for it is living in what is not ourselves. There we helplessly allow nature to choose us and choose for us, and thus we come under the law of natural selection. But in our creation we live in what is ours, and there more and more the world becomes a world of our own selection; it moves with our movement and gives way to us according to the turn we take. Thus we find that man is not content with the world that is given to him; he is bent upon making it his own world. And he is taking to pieces the mechanism of the universe to study it and to refit it according to his own requirements. He is restless under the restrictions of nature's arrangements of things. These impede the freedom of his course at every step, and he has to tolerate the tyranny of matter, which his nature refuses to believe final and inevitable.

Even in his savage days he would change things by magical powers. He dreamed, as no animal ever does, of Aladdin's lamp and of the obedient forces of genii to turn the world upside