X PERSONALITY AS A WHOLE 277 



Personality as a real factor is necessary not only to explain 

 the synthetic relations of the constituent elements in the 

 complex human being, but also to explain the peculiar 

 character of heredity on the human level. Without Person- 

 ality the Body-and-Mind relation in man appears inex- 

 plicable; without Personality, again, man's independence 

 of his hereditary bonds and fixtures would be equally 

 inexplicable. In both respects a far-reaching holistic 

 factor in the nature of Personality is at work, which cannot 

 be ignored without making the entire human situation an 

 insoluble puzzle. 



There is a third point of view which lays a strong emphasis 

 on the individual holistic factor which underlies Personality. 

 That is the point of view of Psychology and Epistomology 

 generally. Both these great disciplines erect the human 

 Subject into a new centre of orientation for all experience 

 of reality. From the purely biological point of view 

 Personality is merely the highest term of a rising series; 

 but it is not a new and unique point of departure in the 

 universe. Psychology and Epistomology, however, regard 

 Personality from this radical point of view. To them it is 

 the Subject of experience to which all the rest is the Object 

 of experience. The Personality in experience as the subject 

 marches right to the centre of the world-picture; it becomes 

 the key and the measure of all things; to it all things 

 become relative in experience. In the new universe of 

 experience, in the world of Spirit, the conscious self or the 

 Personality becomes the new point of universal reference; 

 the co-ordinates of reference are its co-ordinates, as we saw 

 in the last chapter; and without this personal orientation 

 all experience becomes inexplicable and all reality unintelli- 

 gible. We may indeed say that as soon as Personality 

 appears on the scene, the whole universe becomes reorgan- 

 ised, transformed and almost recreated round it as the new 

 centre; the universe is no longer the same as it was before 

 Personality but undergoes a radical change in the subtle pro- 

 cess of human experience. Just as Personality is essentially 

 a new creation, so the world which is its Object in experience 



