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In like manner, the human soul is a medium between a daemoniacal intellect proximately, established above our essence, which it also elevates and perfects, and that corporeal life which is distributed about our body, and which is the cause of its generation, nutrition and increase. This daemoniacal intellect is called by Plato, in the Phaedrus, theoretic and, the governor of the soul.
Wherever the pecuniary culture prevails, the selective process by which men's habits of thought are shaped, and by which the survival of rival lines of descent is decided, proceeds proximately on the basis of fitness for acquisition.
Such categories are, no doubt, unphilosophical in the ultimate sense, but they are proximately convenient and significant. Now, if progress be thus defined, we can see for ourselves that life has truly advanced, not merely in terms of anatomical or physiological i. e. mechanical or chemical complexity, but in terms of mind.
Has not the immense relative change the English have undergone in this respect been coincident with the great relative self-dependence they have been since habituated to? And is not this change proximately ascribable to this habitual self-dependence? Whoever doubts it is asked to assign a more probable cause.
Such a rational vision has not yet been attained by mankind, but it would be absurd to say that because we have not fully nor even proximately attained it, we have not gained any conception whatever of a reliable and intelligible world. The modicum of rationality achieved in the sciences gives us a hint of a perfect rationality which, if unattainable in practice, is not inconceivable in idea.
If this be carefully investigated, it seems highly probable that the ultimate unit of consciousness is something "of the same order as that which we call a nervous shock." Mind is proximately composed of feelings and the relations between feelings; from these, revived, associated, and integrated, the whole fabric of consciousness is built up.
On account of fresh adaptations they have become superfluous, but are transmitted from generation to generation by heredity, and gradually atrophy. We have inherited not only these rudimentary parts, but all the organs of our body, from the mammals proximately from the apes. The human body does not contain a single organ that has not been inherited from the apes.
There are those who seem to think that a monistic view of existence precludes the legitimacy of speaking of soul and body, or of God and spiritual things, or of guidance and management, at all; that is to say, they seem to think that because these things can be ultimately unified, therefore they are unified proximately and for practical purposes.
Now, since the expanse originates from the centre, and not the centre from the expanse, as we said above, and the centre of life, which is the sun of the angelic heaven, is divine love proximately proceeding from God, who is in the midst of that sun; and since the expanse of that centre, which is called the spiritual world, is hence derived; and since from that sun existed the sun of the world, and from the latter its expanse, which is called the natural world; it is evident, that the universe was created by one God."
The forces which have shaped the development of human life and of social structure are no doubt ultimately reducible to terms of living tissue and material environment; but proximately for the purpose in hand, these forces may best be stated in terms of an environment, partly human, partly non-human, and a human subject with a more or less definite physical and intellectual constitution.
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