304 



HOLISM AND EVOLUTION 



CHAP. 



into its own substance — its inner world of thought and will 

 and emotion. And the more thoroughly this mental or per- 

 sonal assimilation is carried out, the richer and more distinc- 

 tive the Personality is. The wider the range of its acquisi- 

 tions, the more powerful and thorough the intellectual and 

 emotional assimilation, the more complex and the grander is 

 the Personality. 



Here then we reach the central idea and function of the 

 Personality. Like organism, only in a far more complex 

 and developed form, it is a whole, with an interior conscious 

 self-direction of all its component functions; with a power 

 of acquisition from its environment which is not mechanical, 

 but really transforms all the acquired material into trans- 

 parent unity with its own nature. It is a whole which in its 

 unique S5aithetic processes continuously performs that great- 

 est of all miracles, the creative transmutation of the lower 

 into the higher in the holistic series. 



And, in order to maintain the right perspective, let us not 

 forget that Personality is but a specialised form of Holism, 

 this Personality in all its uniqueness is still but a function of 

 Nature in the wider sense; that in it we see matter itself 

 become somehow aglow and luminous with its own unsus- 

 pected immanent fire; that as Personality transforms the 

 material into the spiritual, so regressively a deeper view 

 discloses Personality itself as but a more interior function 

 of that Holism which has been slowly evolving since the be- 

 ginning of the universe. 



In fact Personality in its fundamental activities illustrates 

 all those functions which in Chapter VI we have ascribed to 

 wholes. As a whole it is creative, it is free, and it is unified 

 in the highest sense. In that chapter the groundwork of the 

 holistic categories was laid down, and those categories 

 themselves were derived from the concept and nature of 

 wholes. Personality is the highest type of whole which we 

 have knowledge of, and we should therefore expect to find 

 that the holistic categories of Creativeness, Freedom and 

 Wholeness will apply in a pre-eminent degree to the func- 

 tions and activities of Personality. I shall conclude this 



