294 THE WORLD-ENERGY 



Thought his own individual thought. Or, in other 

 words, the "environment" of Man the thinker is pre- 

 cisely the Process of Creation seen as the actualized 

 world of Reason or Thought. So that the real or true 

 life of Man is the continuous adjustment of the internal 

 relations consisting of his own individual thought-process 

 to that total round of "external" relations consisting of 

 the perfect Thought-Process unfolded in the divine 

 World-Energy. And this is "external" to man only in 

 so far as it remains unrealized in man. 



Thus the descent of man must be considered from two 

 points of view which at first sight seem to exclude each 

 other. He is an animal and he is also a thinker, by 

 which latter fact he is not only contrasted with, but, it 

 would seem, separated by an impassable gulf from, all 

 other animals, and even from himself as an animal. And 

 yet, as we have seen, all animals, along with all other 

 realities in the Universe, are also manifestations of 

 Thought and owe their very existence to this fact. Nor 

 is this all. On the contrary, the classification of animals, 

 which, not so long since, was based largely upon the 

 external characteristics of form and color, has gradually 

 come to be based upon the internal characteristics of 

 structure and function. It is not a little significant, too, 

 that in this new method of classification the nervous 

 system, as the more immediate external measure of the 

 inmost function of consciousness, has come to be re- 

 garded as the final test of superiority in the comparison 

 of animal types. Measured by this test, Man simply 

 stands at the head of the whole series of forms of the 

 animal kingdom. For this series of forms presents a 

 scale of consciousness grading upward by scarcely per- 



