natural and remain a man--to separate the two
means death to man as we know him. But there is a great difference
between his position in the natural world and his position in the
spiritual world. He seems to be the last word in the world of nature, he
has reached heights far beyond those reached by any other flesh and
blood. He is, so far as we know, the culminating point of natural
evolution--the final possibility in the natural world. But the stage of
nature only represents the first stage in the development of the
universe.

There is an infinitely higher stage of life, the spiritual life. And if
man is the final point of progress in the world of nature, he is, in his
primitive state, only at the threshold of the spiritual world. But he
is not an entire stranger to the spiritual--the germ is in him, and the
spiritual is consequently not an alien world for him. If the spiritual
were something entirely foreign it would be vain to expect much progress
through mere impulses from without. On the contrary, it is the spiritual
that makes man really great, and is the most fundamental part of his
nature.

The two stages of life, then, are present in man--the natural and the
spiritual; the former highly developed, the latter, at first, in an
undeveloped state.

Now the great aim of the universe is to pass gradually from the natural
to the spiritual plane of life. This does not mean that the latter is
the product of the former stage, for this is not the case. It means that
the deeper reality in life is the spiritual, and that the spiritual
develops through the natural in its own particular way. And this
particular way is not a mere development but a _self_-development. The
aim of the spiritual is to develop its own self through the human being.
In this way man is given the possibility of developing a self--a
personality in a very real sense.

Thus we arrive at some idea of the relation there exists between the
spiritual and the natural, and of the place of the spiritual and the
natural in man. The spiritual is neither the product nor an attribute of
the natural. Man is the border creature of the two worlds; he represents
the ultimate possibility of the one, and possesses potentialities in
regard to the other. The great object of his life must be to develop,
through making use of and conquering the life of nature, his higher self
into a free, spiritual, and immortal personality. The progressive stages
in this direction must