the rest of the family. It _is_ blood connection. For the fecundating
nuclei are the very spark-essence of the blood. And while life lives
the parent nuclei maintain their own centrality and dynamic
effectiveness within the solar plexus of the child. So that every
individual has mother and father both sparkling within himself.

But this is rather a preliminary truth than an intrinsic truth. The
intrinsic truth of every individual is the new unit of unique
individuality which emanates from the fusion of the parent nuclei.
This is the incalculable and intangible Holy Ghost each time--each
individual his own Holy Ghost. When, at the moment of conception, the
two parent nuclei fuse to form a new unit of life, then takes place
the great mystery of creation. A new individual appears--not the
result of the fusion merely. Something more. The quality of
individuality cannot be derived. The new individual, in his singleness
of self, is a perfectly new whole. He is not a permutation and
combination of old elements, transferred through the parents. No, he
is something underived and utterly unprecedented, unique, a new soul.

This quality of pure individuality is, however, only the one supreme
quality. It consummates all other qualities, but does not consume
them. All the others are there, all the time. And only at his maximum
does an individual surpass all his derivative elements, and become
purely himself. And most people never get there. In his own pure
individuality a man surpasses his father and mother, and is utterly
unknown to them. "Woman, what have I to do with thee?" But this does
not alter the fact that within him lives the mother-quick and the
father-quick, and that though in his wholeness he is rapt away beyond
the old mother-father connections, they are still there within him,
consummated but not consumed. Nor does it alter the fact that very few
people surpass their parents nowadays, and attain any individuality
beyond them. Most men are half-born slaves: the little soul they are
born with just atrophies, and merely the organism emanates, the new
self, the new soul, the new swells into manhood, like big potatoes.

So there we are. But considering man at his best, he is at the start
faced with the great problem. At the very start he has to undertake
his tripartite being, the mother within him, the father within him,
and the Holy Ghost, the self which he is supposed to consummate, and
which mostly he doesn't.

And