302 HOLISM AND EVOLUTION chap. 



knowledge or experience or falls under social or other in- 

 fluences in a mechanical manner without assimilating them, 

 he injures his Personality; he overburdens and disorganises 

 himself; he surrenders to the environment that in him 

 which is and should ever remain a pure unconstrained self- 

 activity. There are many forms which this enslavement of 

 the Personality takes. Looking upon the Personality as 

 merely a natural activity and not yet in an ethical or religious 

 light, we find that it is sometimes overloaded and gorged 

 with knowledge which it cannot assimilate and digest, and 

 the person degenerates into a mere gatherer of knowledge, 

 a sort of intellectual hoarder. In other cases, again, it 

 accepts the social influences and conventions without mas- 

 tering and assimilating them and develops into a purely 

 conventional character in which the spontaneity of the inner 

 life is deadened under a mass of social conventions. In other 

 cases it acquires power which it is beyond its capacity to use 

 wisely and well, and it develops a proud, cruel, overbearing 

 or tyrannical character, and that too under circumstances 

 which would have built up a strong and noble Personality 

 in a case where the assimilative, controlling, co-ordinating 

 power was greater. Too often, alas! it simply surrenders 

 itself weakly and self-indulgently to outside influences or 

 temptations, and becomes weak, vicious and contemptible. 

 In all these cases the Personality succumbs to the environ- 

 ment, to external influences which bear on it, but which it 

 cannot resist or master and make its own; in fact, to the 

 introduction of foreign or hostile material into its pure inner 

 self-activity. The ideal Personality is a whole; it is a whole 

 in the sense that it should not have in it anything 

 which is not of a piece with itself, which is alien or external 

 to itself. Any such extraneous or adventitious element in it 

 which does not really harmonise with it prevents it to that 

 extent from being a whole. Now as the Personality is a 

 self-realising holistic activity in us, it follows that its 

 immanent end and ideal is to realise and develop itself as a 

 whole, to establish and secure its wholeness, and to render 

 itself proof against invasion and injury from all extraneous 



