214 The Awakening of Personality [CH. 



viduals, of the interpenetrative nexus of life, begin to 

 dawn, self-determination comes, and order that pro- 

 ceeds from within. Till then the order must be imposed 

 from without. In nature the final issue indicates that 

 order is imposed with a purpose, and purpose implies, 

 we have argued, a Personal God. The purpose is fellow- 

 ship. 



Now self-determination, and its correlative self- 

 limitation, presuppose the recognition of the self. At 

 first the activities of the creature are separate occur- 

 rences. Stimuli producing pure sensation give rise to the 

 suitable impulse which issues in the right response. 

 Somewhere in the region between the sensation and the 

 impulse lurks a trace of freedom ; we have seen that even 

 before self-consciousness the creature is winning its way 

 to greater control of matter. But this freedom is the 

 freedom of the vital impulse, not of the individual 

 organism. The race progresses, not the individual; the 

 latter is a machine growing more perfect in its responses 

 to repeated stimuli by habit, its own organisation being 

 such as to render this inevitable. As we go up the scale 

 the sensations and resulting impulses develope into true 

 cognitions and conations. None the less, until they are 

 unified by emotion until the freedom expresses itself 

 in the unifying medium of self-hood there is nothing 

 possible for the individual but external limitation. The 

 laws of biological economics must impose that order 

 which the creature cannot impose upon itself. Limita- 

 tion is the only alternative to chaos; and this must be 

 imposed from without until the stage of self-limitation 

 is reached. When this dawns the other may be gradu- 

 ally relaxed; but until self-determination is perfect there 

 must be dual control. 



We now begin to see the index of true freedom in self- 

 limitation ; and the process of winning freedom becomes 

 identical with the process of self-imposition of laws that 



