228 The Evolution of Transcendence [CH. 



personality deepens and widens, achieves form as our 

 immanence shapes the work, which it does, be it noted, 

 through the expression of a creative idea. So, finally, 

 there emerges an entity a self which expresses and 

 confirms the purpose of that idea, as the completed 

 being of living, reciprocal Love a being that is ab- 

 solute and not of time. 



The evolution of personality begins with immanence; 

 yet it could not so begin but for transcendence the 

 knowledge of self-purposes that are real. Before the 

 dawn of creaturely self-consciousness there was imman- 

 ence, but it was God's, not the creature's. On this point 

 we were not clear in an earlier work 1 . Yet, when once the 

 conception of this occurs to the mind, its obvious truth 

 precludes the possibility that one is mistaken. Before 

 self-consciousness has dawned at all life can experience 

 nothing but otherness, and even that is not known, for 

 the knowledge of otherness connotes the knowledge of 

 self as well, and this knowledge is a necessary condition 

 of the true immanence which signifies purposive action 

 in and through the recognition of matter as a means 

 to an end, so that otherness is absorbed in mediation. 

 Before this self-knowledge begins life must be but a 

 bundle of needs and perceptions, as Hume wrongly 

 claimed to be the case with man needs and perceptions 

 that are related to no self, but provoke only the instant 

 response of self-preservation. Self-preservation, and the 

 altruistic urging of the vital impulse that is all there 

 is in a life that is not personal ; consciousness is merely 

 the clearing-house for needs, not being conscious of 



that "self-determination is the starting-point of personality," be- 

 cause the raison d'lire of freedom begins to be grasped in true 

 immanence, as purposive; even though the discovery that the 

 purpose is only achievable through self-abnegation does not come 

 till later. 



1 Evolution and Spiritual Life. 



