PHILOSOPHICAL ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 



course, very good reasons for opposing matter and spirit. 

 Plato and Descartes were no fools. In reflecting upon his 

 intellectual knowledge, man experiences the spiritual character 

 of this knowledge. His concepts are abstract and universal 

 and as such beyond the hmitations of time and space that are 

 typical of matter. Even concepts of material things, for 

 example, the concepts of colors, which lose their content when 

 there is no actual connection with the material sense-represen- 

 tation, are nevertheless not tied to just one particular instance. 

 Even they are universal. 



Much more important, however, for the spiritual character 

 of his intellectual knowledge is that man is conscious of the 

 abstractness of his concepts and is aware also of the limitations 

 of his knowledge. Reflecting upon his intellectual knowledge, 

 he discovers its typical limitation. In realizing his limitations 

 man is, in principle, beyond any limitation. Because he is 

 capable of evaluating his situation as limited, as bound to 

 matter, he is at the same time above his situation, and that 

 is exactly what we call spiritual. We try to express by this 

 term the "openness," "freedom," and "self-presence" of the 

 spirit, as contrasted with the closedness and lack of freedom 

 of matter. Thus spiritual seems the exact opposite of material. 

 The logical consequence of this line of thought seems to be a 

 dualistic conception of man. Yet, if we study man as we 

 experience him, we don't find this consequence of our reflec- 

 tion to be true, for man is a unity, a unity of matter and spirit. 

 If this unity seems impossible, then something must be wrong 

 with our concepts. In one way or another, any anthropology 

 will have to acknowledge the basic fact of man's unity. 



Of course, that unity is not a monistic unity. Monism, be 

 it materialistic or spiritualistic^ does not help us any further. 

 Matter is not spirit, and spirit is not matter, yet both are 

 present in man in such a way that they are united in a real 

 unity. St. Thomas has given a sharp formulation of the problem 

 when he stated that the anima, the human soul, was both 

 form o[ the body and a subsistent spiritual being. It is a 

 formulation which balances on the edge of contradiction. Yet 

 I think it is the best formulation ever given. It would be a 

 flagrant contradiction if matter and spirit were the contra- 



71 



