n 



314 HOLISM AND EVOLUTION chap. 



human instincts, but their refinement and sublimation, their 

 subordination and co-ordination in the growing whole of the 

 Personality under the hegemony of the later and higher 

 ethical factors. 



While moral discipline thus plays an important part in 

 personal evolution, it must not, however, be supposed that 

 Personality should go on for ever oppressed by an over- 

 powering sense of Duty, and should hear for ever the thun- 

 dering reverberations of the Categorical Imperative. No 

 doubt when the person at his moral awakening or some other 

 moral crisis in his life, first hears the trumpet-call of Duty, 

 the effect is tremendous. But the thunder should die away 

 into the still small voice of the inner life; the apparently 

 alien forbidding aspect of Duty should be assimilated into 

 the quiet normal impulses of the Personality; moral 

 discipline should so thoroughly become second nature to the 

 ethical warrior that its effects will be there without its 

 operation being felt. The Personality should reach such a 

 standard of purity and homogeneity that there will be no 

 alien stuff in it to offer resistance to the promptings of 

 Conscience or Duty or to cause friction or disquietude in the 

 soul. The highly developed and disciplined Personality, 

 pure and homogeneous in itself, and in harmony with 

 universal Holism, and thus finely responsive to all things 

 true and good and fair in the universe, will not only embody 

 the ancient Greek ideal of o-co^pocru^i??, or moderation and 

 self-control, but will also come to realise both the Stoic and 

 the Epicurean ideal of drapajta, or tranquillity of soul, and 

 finally to know that peace of God, passing all understanding, 

 which is the supreme promise of the Buddhist no less than 

 of the Christian religion. 



The ethical message of Holism to man is summed up in 

 two words: Freedom and Purity. And from what we have 

 just seen it is clear that these two grand ethical ideals are 

 at bottom identical. The function of the ideal of Freedom 

 is to secure the inward self-determination of the Personality, 

 its riddance of all alien obstructive elements, and thus its 

 perfection as a pure, radiant, transparent, homogeneous 



