Page:Personality (Lectures delivered in America).djvu/99

Rh universe and into the universe of man at the same time. This latter is a world of ideas and institutions, of stored knowledge and trained habits. It has been built by strenuous endeavours of ages, by martyrdoms of heroic men. Its strata are deposits of the renunciations of countless individuals in all ages and countries. It has its good and evil elements,—the inequalities of its surface and its temperature making the flow of life full of surprises.

This is the world of man's second birth, the extra-natural world, where the dualism of the animal life and the moral makes us conscious of our personality as man. Whatever hinders this life of man from establishing perfect relationship with its moral world is an evil. It is death,—a far greater death than the death of the natural life.

In the natural world, with the help of science, man is turning the forces of matter from tyranny into obedience.

But in his moral world he has a harder task to accomplish. He has to turn his own passions and desires from tyranny into obedience. And continual efforts have been directed towards this end in all times and climates. Nearly all our institutions are the outcome of these endeavours.