Organization in Relation to Environment 817 



improving, evolving, and raising man to increasing platforms 

 of perfection. 



By loftiest proenvironal effort man has attained to loftiest 

 moral and spiritual results. In some cases the upward struggle 

 has been for many individuals a life-long one, in which a too 

 powerful biotic or cognitic or cogitic activity has retarded 

 the highest spiritic. At times in strong wills, after years of 

 stimulation by the biotic or cognitic, and to a greater or less 

 extent by the cogitic, a stage was reached where a great pro- 

 environal effort set before them a spiritic picture that caused 

 a surcharging of the spiritic man at the expense of the lower 

 energies. Such has been called conversion, that has been 

 ridiculed by most scientists, or has been contemptuously re- 

 jected by so-called atheists. But, as Begbie has well put it, 

 "the fact stands clear and unassailable that, by this thing 

 called conversion, men consciously wrong, inferior, and un- 

 happy become consciously right, superior, and happy" (229: 17). 



It is equally one of the regrettable results of scientific in- 

 quiry in the past that aspiration and spiritual impulse have 

 been more or less decried, even put out of court — while plainly 

 confronting one as human phenomena that call for scientific 

 explanation as much as do sexual impulse, movement toward 

 the light, or primary cognitic actions of man. All call for 

 and will receive, we are persuaded, an exact scientific expla- 

 nation. 



The writer proposes now to compare in the remaining pages 

 of this chapter the relative values and exhibitions of the biotic, 

 the cognitic, the cogitic, and the spiritic in definite human 

 lives that he has come into close daily contact with for at 

 least twelve years during some part of the past forty years 

 of his life, from boyhood upward. 



If a human being constantly proenvirons, desires, and plans 

 conditions that look mainly toward gratification of the carnal 

 or biotic nature, increasing flows of biotic energy will be di- 

 rected toward the alimentary canal, the associated nerves, 

 the sympathetic system, and the cerebro-spinal nerves asso- 

 ciated with the digestive and excretory tracts. On the prin- 



