rmed the Spirit of Nature with the
ideal as its essence. And Nature in her turn acted on the particles--as
Englishmen form the spirit of England and the spirit of England acts
back upon individual Englishmen.

It was the working of this Spirit, with its self-improving ideal, that
has produced Nature as we see her to-day. The distant ideal
furnished the motive-power by which the whole is driven forward.
And this ideal was itself built up by the unceasing interaction of the
whole upon the parts and the parts upon the whole. What was in the
parts responded to the stimulus of what was in the whole, and the
whole was affected by the activity of the parts. What was immanent
responded to what was transcendent. And the transcendence was
affected by the immanence.

CHAPTER XI

NATURE'S IDEAL

If we have been right so far, we have arrived at the position that
Nature is a Personal Being in process of realising an ideal operating
within herself. We have now to satisfy ourselves as to the character
of that ideal. What is the full ideal working in the whole of Nature
we cannot possibly know. We can only know so much of it as can be
detected with our imperfect faculties on this minute atom of the
Universe on which we dwell. We cannot be sure we have even
discerned the highest levels of the ideal. For there may be higher
beings than ourselves on the planets of the stars, and among those
higher beings higher qualities than any we know of, or can conceive,
may have emerged. Love is the highest quality we know. But love in
any true sense of the word--love as a self-conscious activity--has
only emerged with man, and man has only appeared within the last
half-million of the Earth's four or five hundred million years of
existence as the Earth. We cannot, therefore, presume to say what is
the ideal in its highest development for the whole of Nature.

But from our experience here we can see what that ideal is up to
(what for us is) a very high level, and we can make out what is
apparently its fundamental characteristic. I obtained my best
conception of it on the evening I left Lhasa at the conclusion of my
Mission to Tibet in 1904, when I had an experience of such value
for determining Nature's ideal, and, for me at any rate, so
convincingly corroborative of the conclusions which others who
have had similar experiences have drawn from them as to Nature's
ideal, that I hope I may be excused for relating in some detail the
circumstan