vin] Tke Evolution of Transcendence 227 



Here, too, as everywhere, is no actual pause, no break. 

 Insensibly, and side by side with growing freedom, 

 grows the understanding that freedom by itself is va- 

 lueless, because purposeless. A free mankind does not 

 suddenly pause in its labours and ask, appalled, What is 

 this freedom we have won? Individuals do, nations do, 

 after some great cataclysm; but for men as a whole 

 there is slow growth of comprehension in this, as in all 

 else. Freedom is no sooner gained than it is freely 

 tossed away. New limitations are embraced limita- 

 tions that proceed from within, not from without. The 

 self-determination of freedom is the starting point of per- 

 sonality; its goal is the self-limitation which is inextricably 

 intertwined with creative love. 



Here is the initiation of an immanence akin to God's, 

 for it is full of purpose. Through external limitation 

 men win to self-limitation; and self-limitation, though 

 it be immanence, is yet rooted and grounded in trans- 

 cendence; for it is love fellowship that brings it to 

 pass. The will, the emotion, the thought have taken 

 action, identifying their good with a principle which 

 formulates the very nature of God. 



There is a kind of double consciousness at this stage, 

 for in it coexist external limitation.together withachieved 

 freedom imposing its own purposive restrictions on the 

 self. There is consciousness of the ego as ultimately 

 real, and consciousness of the phenomena as also real. 



Yet in fact the two do not clash; and that, because 

 there is some measure of appreciation of the Whole lying 

 behind and synthesising our dual experience. We do 

 know what purpose means, however dimly we can see 

 the purpose in the whole. 



The evolution of personality, then, though wrapped up 

 in the evolution of transcendence, begins with imman- 

 ence, when the material is recognised as material 1 . This 



1 This is only another way of putting our previous gtatement 



15 a 



