68 The Triunity of Man [CH. 



He is conscious that his existence depends on the activi- 

 ties of others. As he realises more of the problems of 

 the world he lives in, he begins to understand that he, 

 and his parents, and all other men, depend for their 

 existence on the activity of God. In other words, he is 

 conscious of sonship in the sense of external causedness. 

 This simple recognition of himself as a result, an effect, 

 is of the same nature as the recognition of simple parent- 

 hood. They are two links in the chain of becoming, 

 when becoming is looked at as the process of an external 

 manifold. They are the correlatives of progress by 

 evolution. Both are in themselves essentially temporal. 

 They have nothing of the permanence of pure being. 

 They are in time and of time ; and only of time, because 

 they have no meaning except as process. To know that 

 one is caused, by itself gives no glimmer of light upon 

 the motive of that causation, no faintest acquaintance 

 with the essential causal activity, any more than to be 

 an unconscious cause gives any notion of the motive of 

 causation or knowledge of the nature of causal activity. 

 Only when the concept of causality is absorbed in the 

 higher concept of the whole of Ground and Consequence 

 -does the true nature of causal activity become clear. 

 As we have already seen, man is also conscious of 

 sonship of dependence on others in a more subtle 

 manner, from his own inner need of sharing others' 

 experience as well as of making them share his own. 

 Thus the reaching out of personality into others, the 

 mutual interpenetration that is so fundamental a 

 character of personality, involves the external relations 

 of both fatherhood and sonship the wish to add to the 

 environment, or more basally, to the experience, of 

 others; and the wish to add to, or rather to fulfil or 

 complete, our own experience by sharing that of others. 

 Both ways, the relation is one of pure otherness, and as 

 long as we are imperfect, it is a time-relation of becom- 



