THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION 47 



conceptions — of infinity with mere indefiniteness, and 

 of necessity with mere subjective inability to get rid of 

 a hardened habitual association. These properties of 

 Time, taken, too, in their unrestricted meaning, are 

 unreservedly true by Mr. Spencer's own criterion — 

 the "inconceivability of the opposite." 



Moreover, as pointed out near the beginning of the 

 present essay, they are conditions precedent to form- 

 ing any habitual association at all. It is just in 

 thinking all these elements in an active originating 

 Unit-thought, or an " I," that the essential and 

 characteristic nature of man or any other real intelli- 

 gence consists. Such an originating Unit-thinking, 

 providing its own element-complex of primal thoughts 

 that condition its experience, and that thus provide 

 for that experience the form of a cosmic Evolutional 

 Series, is precisely what an intelligent being is. Thus 

 creatively to think and be a World is what it means 

 to be a man. To think and enact such a world merely 

 in the unity framed for it by natural causation, is 

 what it means to be a "natural" man ; to think and 

 enact it in its higher unity, its unity as framed 

 by the supernatural causation of the Pure Ideals, 

 supremely by the Moral Ideal, is what it means to 

 be a " spiritual " man, a moral and religious man ; or, 

 in the philosophical and true sense of the words, a 

 supernatural being — a being transcending and yet 

 including Nature, not excluding or annulling it. 



