CHAP. XI FUNCTIONS AND IDEALS 291 



Personality is not only a self-restorer; it is a supreme spiritual 

 metaboliser ; it absorbs for its growth a vast variety of experience 

 which it creatively transmutes and assimilates for its own spiritual 

 nourishment. As metabolism and assimilation are fundamental 

 functions of all organic wholes, the Personality takes in and as- 

 similates all the social and other influences which surround it, and 

 makes them all contribute towards its holistic self-realisation. 

 Personalities vary greatly in their capacity for holistic assimila- 

 tion, some easily suffering from spiritual indigestion, while great 

 minds and characters can absorb a vast experience which only 

 serves to fructify and enrich them without any detriment to their 

 spiritual wholeness and integrity. Where a Personality takes in 

 alien experience which it cannot assimilate into its own spiritual 

 substance, such experience becomes an impurity to it; "purity" in 

 reference to Personality meaning the absence of all elements alien, 

 heterogeneous and disharmonious to the Personality. 



The holistic categories sketched in Chapter VI are specially 

 characteristic of Personality as a whole par excellence: these are 

 Creativeness, Freedom and Wholeness or Purity. Its creativeness 

 refers to the ideal Values, rational, ethical, artistic and religious, 

 which it creates for its own spiritual environment and inner guid- 

 ance and illumination. As these, however, fall outside the scope 

 of this work, the category of Creativeness as applying to Person- 

 ality will not be further considered here. But something must be 

 said about Freedom and Wholeness or Purity. 



The essence of Personality is creative freedom in respect of its 

 own conditions of experience and development ; as an initiator, me- 

 taboliser and assimilator it has practical self-determination. Again, 

 as a selector and co-ordinator of the elements in the situations that 

 confront it, it also has practical freedom. Its very nature as a 

 whole confers freedom upon it. This freedom is not a negation of 

 the physical order of causality but arises inside that order ; holistic 

 freedom is a continuous organic or psychic miracle which happens 

 between cause and effect, so to say, as we saw in Chapter VI. 

 Freedom is thus a fact in the universe, and is not a mere capricious 

 power peculiar to the will; it pertains to Personality as a whole. 

 Freedom means holistic self-determination, and as such it becomes 

 one of the great ideals of Personality, whose self-realisation is 

 dependent on its inner holistic freedom. 



As regards Wholeness or Purity, it is essentially identical with 

 Freedom. Purity means the elimination of disharmonious ele- 

 ments from the Personality. It means the harmonious co-ordina- 

 tion of the higher and lower elements in human nature, the sub- 

 limation of the lower into the higher, and thus the enrichment of 

 the higher through the lower. From this it follows that moral 

 discipline is an essential part in the culture of Personality. Per- 



