CHAPTER XI 



NATURE'S IDEAL 



If we have been right so far, we have arrived at the 

 position that Nature is a Personal Being in process 

 of realising an ideal operating within herself. We 

 have now to satisfy ourselves as to the character of 

 that ideal. What is the full ideal working in the 

 whole of Nature we cannot possibly know. We 

 can only know so much of it as can be detected with 

 our imperfect faculties on this minute atom of the 

 Universe on which we dwell. We cannot be sure 

 we have even discerned the highest levels of the 

 ideal. For there may be higher beings than our- 

 selves on the planets of the stars, and among those 

 higher beings higher qualities than any we know of, 

 or can conceive, may have emerged. Love is the 

 highest quality we know. But love in any true 

 sense of the word — love as a self-conscious activity 

 — has only emerged with man, and man has only 

 appeared within the last half -million of the Earth's 

 four or five hundred million years of existence as 

 the Earth. We cannot, therefore, presume to say 

 what is the ideal in its highest development for the 

 whole of Nature. 



But from our experience here we can see what 

 that ideal is up to (what for us is) a very high level, 

 and we can make out what is apparently its funda- 



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