THE END OF THE PROCESS. 435 



fall, we are told, was due to pride, a term which 

 would describe not unaptly the defiant resistance of 

 ultimate spirits to the attempt to induce them to 

 submit their selfish and intractable wills to the har- 

 mony of cosmic order. All this agrees excellently 

 well with the conclusions we have independently 

 reached ; we also were led to ascribe Evil to the 

 agency of superhuman forces, viz. the Egos (ch. x. 

 § 25), and to find the source of its all-pervading taint 

 in the region of the pre-cosmic ; in short, to regard 

 the nature of the world as conditioned by what 

 existed before its production and before the begin- 

 ning of its process. On the other hand, the fall of 

 the angels must not be interpreted as a lapse from 

 an initial harmony, in view of the fact that harmony, 

 once attained, would necessarily be eternal and un- 

 changeable (§ 10), and it seems preferable to regard 

 ourselves as angels in course of development out of 

 isolated and unsociable spirits. 



Thus the beginning of the world-process, i.e., of 

 what we call the world, may be conceived as taking 

 place in consequence of the union of the individual 

 spirits into some sort of whole, under the influence 

 of the Divine Spirit, and the object of the process 

 will be attained when that spiritual whole or com- 

 monwealth can be rendered completely harmonious. 



§ 4. But though the pre-cosmic conditions of the 

 world-process enable us to understand much that 

 would otherwise remain mysterious, they are not of 

 such direct interest as the question of \h^ posl-cosmic 

 condition and end of the world-process. 



If our speculations have not entirely missed their 

 mark, the world-process will come to an end when 

 all the spirits whom it is designed to harmonize 

 have been united in a perfect society. Or, to put it 



