226 The Evolution of Transcendence [CH. 



satisfy their inmost being and be to them the great 

 reality of their life. Love must be won; its processes 

 learned from the inside by progressive discovery. The 

 oneness of all phenomena as parts of Being must be 

 realised; and to achieve this men must see all as part 

 of themselves they must be first oppressed with the 

 full sense of the otherness of things, before they can 

 begin to know true immanence which sees the obverse of 

 limitation as mediation ; which sees purpose and a valid 

 aim in the constraint imposed by external conditions, 

 and, so seeing, begins to lose the oppression of deter- 

 mination from without. 



Men, then, cannot even begin to be immanent till they 

 are self-conscious, for immanence means the absorption 

 of 'otherness' in mediation, and to recognise otherness 

 at all involves the recognition of self-hood. In truth 

 all these things self-consciousness and recognition of 

 otherness ; transcendence and immanence involve each 

 other, and are different aspects of one stage. Other- 

 ness cannot be recognised as such without self -conscious- 

 ness; self -consciousness carries with it as correlative 

 the stable, timeless, ego-consciousness of transcendence ; 

 and all otherness is seen as at least the material of im- 

 manence, for the 'other' is recognised as potentially 

 usable to mediate self-ends. The nexus is close. 



Phenomena, then, are recognised as being not merely 

 dead factors exercising immutable control over us. It is 

 true, they do shape man's destiny. He becomes what 

 he becomes for better adaptation to the conditions of 

 his being. But all the while he is the master, they the 

 slaves who minister to his needs. They are recognised 

 as mediators of the self-realisation of the ego. 



Through external limitation men are led on to free- 

 dom and find they have clutched a bubble. Freedom 

 itself is valueless, and in their long progress they have 

 learned to make value-judgments. 



