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Updated: May 29, 2025
If the conception of man's relation to the world set forth in these chapters is sound, work is the chief instrumentality in the education of the human spirit; for it involves both self-realisation and the adjustment of self to the order of life. Through effort a man brings to light all that is in him, and by effort he finds his place in the universal order.
It resembles a stream whose waves flow casually and transiently in animal consciousness, and are soon withdrawn again, to break forth anew at another place, in the personal spirit, where they attain to permanent indissoluble form, since they have now at last attained to self-realisation, and fulfilled the purpose of all cosmic existence, the reflecting of the eternal personality in the creature.
It is no use saying that it is a delusion of ours; that unless we cast it away we cannot enter upon the path of self-realisation. It will never do the least good to attempt the realisation of the infinite apart from the world of action. It is not the truth that man is active on compulsion.
And an adumbration of such freedom, which is the aim of self-realisation, would help us to penetrate deeply into the nature of things.
Now self-realisation is a twofold process. In the absence of a fitter and more adequate word, I have applied the term perceptive to those faculties by means of which we lay hold upon the world that surrounds us, and draw it into ourselves and make it our own.
For in holding on to it with grim resolve lies the only possibility of full self-realisation. Let a man cultivate himself along the line of what he is if he would come to his best and achieve any genuine success, any real happiness in life. The world is full of men who have failed, simply because they left untrained what they were, to try to be what they were not and never could become.
So far as the word 'self-realisation' can be made to cover such different activities, it is void of moral content and cannot express the nature of the moral ideal. Green is perfectly alive to the need of a distinction and to the difficulty of drawing it.
The final proof that the ethics of self-realisation are sound to the core lies in the fact that the path of self-realisation, besides emancipating from egoism and sensuality, leads all who walk in it, first into the foreglow and then into the sunshine of love. But it is with the social rather than the ethical aspect of self-realisation that I am now concerned.
To one who has convinced himself that human nature is fundamentally good, in the sense that the new-born child is as a rule sound and healthy on all the planes of his being, it must be clear that the path of soul-growth or self-realisation is the only way of salvation.
In the second place, it was due to the prominence of the negative or ascetic element in Christianity as commonly presented, to the fact that in that presentation the law of self-sacrifice bore no relation to the law of self-realisation. In both of these respects he would have found himself much more at home with the apprehension of Christianity which we have inherited from the nineteenth century.
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