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In those happy persons who had already passed into biography and history, in their peccadilloes no less than their virtues, the Bishop's interest was boundless. The distinction tended to make him a little super- or infra-human; but it enhanced the fragrance and delicacy of his personality.
This means that the life of each individual child is overflowing through many channels, an overflow which will carry the out-welling life into the lives of other living beings human and infra-human, actual and imaginary and even beyond these, when it has been met and reinforced by other surging currents, into the impersonal life of Humanity and of Nature. The Dramatic Instinct.
Man, we now have reason to believe, has been evolved from infra-human ancestors, in whom pure reason hardly existed, if at all, and whose mind, so far as it can have had any function, would appear to have been an organ for adapting their movements to the impressions received from the environment, so as to escape the better from destruction.
We pass by the infra-human and the supra-human bestiality and holiness; but have still to deal with Continence and its contrasted qualities, which are concerned with the passions. In the popular view, continence, self-control, is adherence to our formed judgment. Incontinence is yielding to passion where we know it to be wrong, and may be indulged in the pursuit of vengeance, honour, or gain.
And the truth is that we feel God less as a superhuman consciousness than as the actual consciousness of the whole human race, past, present, and future, as the collective consciousness of the whole race, and still more, as the total and infinite consciousness which embraces and sustains all consciousnesses, infra-human, human, and perhaps, super-human.
The following considerations will serve to make this clear. The most oppressive corollary of the doctrine of descent is undoubtedly that through it the human race seems to become lost in the infra-human, from which it cannot be separated by any hard and fast boundaries, or absolute lines of demarcation.
Occasionally in recent years students of human diseases have employed monkeys or apes for experimental tests, but aside from the isolated results thus obtained, extremely little is known concerning the diseases peculiar to the various types of infra-human primates or the significant relations of their diseases to those of man.
This has led him to formulate the following two problems in animal behavior: Are there any types of infra-human primate behavior which cannot be regarded as expressions of a tendency to seek sexual satisfaction, but which have the essential objective characteristics of sexual activity?
That our own personality is the highest unity of which we have any proper non-analogous notion; that it is the measure by which we spontaneously try to explain to ourselves other unities, higher or lower, by means of extensions or limitations; that our first impulse, prior to correction, is to conceive everything self-wise, be it super-human or infra-human, is of course profoundly true; but for this reason to make "self" the all-explaining and only category, to deny any higher order of reality because we can have no definite conception of its precise nature, is the narrowness which has brought Idealism into such difficulties.
In respect of religion they are likewise isolated, for they are Buddhists, and have consequently no co-religionists nearer than Mongolia or Thibet. But it is their physiognomy that most strikingly distinguishes them from the surrounding peoples, and stamps them as Mongols of the purest water. There is something almost infra-human in their ugliness.
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