Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/108

Rh conceptions — of infinity with mere indefiniteness, and of necessity with mere subjective inability to get rid of a hardened habitual association. These properties of Time, taken, too, in their unrestricted meaning, are unreservedly true by Mr. Spencer’s own criterion — the “inconceivability of the opposite.”

Moreover, as pointed out near the beginning of the present essay, they are conditions precedent to forming any habitual association at all. It is just in thinking all these elements in an active originating Unit-thought, or an “I,” that the essential and characteristic nature of man or any other real intelligence consists. Such an originating Unit-thinking, providing its own element-complex of primal thoughts that condition its experience, and that thus provide for that experience the form of a cosmic Evolutional Series, is precisely what an intelligent being is. Thus creatively to think and be a World is what it means to be a man. To think and enact such a world merely in the unity framed for it by natural causation, is what it means to be a “natural” man; to think and enact it in its higher unity, its unity as framed by the supernatural causation of the Pure Ideals, supremely by the Moral Ideal, is what it means to be a “spiritual” man, a moral and religious man; or, in the philosophical and true sense of the words, a supernatural being — a being transcending and yet including Nature, not excluding or annulling it.