416 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



hibit each the inherent principle in its purity or fulness, 

 or in that perfection which we see before us in single 

 specimens of the human race, — showing rather endless 

 varieties and possibilities of arrested or degraded de- 

 velopment, in a profusion of beautiful, grotesque, or even 

 hideous examples in the lower and higher forms of 

 vegetable, animate, and intelligent nature, — just as little 

 do we find the spiritual principle everywhere equally 

 active and clear in its historical life and development. 

 On the contrary, we find the spiritual principle also branch- 

 ing off sometimes into a one-sided growth, not without 

 rising, in single instances and under favourable conditions, 

 to rare beauty and sublimity, exhibiting often also the 

 grotesque, the degrading, and the repulsive. And yet, 

 as we have learned, through biology, to connect all 

 living forms together from the lowest to the highest, 

 and to recognise in them the luxuriations of one and 

 the same principle, the principle of Life, so also we 

 recognise in the whole religious life of mankind the 

 working of one and the same principle which we term the 

 Spirit. And there are still other lessons which we may 

 learn from this analogy. The highest, purest, and fullest 

 development of the principle of life, that which gives us 

 also the only clue we possess to its intrinsic value and 

 meaning, is to be found, for us human observers, in single 

 specimens of the human race, in the highest examples of 

 personality. It seems as if the vital principle has at- 

 tained to a kind of finality in such instances and on the 

 occasion of such creations. Similarly the spiritual view 

 of things seems to recognise a kind of finality in the 

 Christian conception of Love as the ground and the 



