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Civilisation and Culture 83a growing, but still imperfect harmony and synthesis, and shebrings him back violently to her original principles, sometimeseven to something like her earlier conditions so that he may startafresh on a larger curve of progress and self-fulfilment.It would seem at first sight that since man is pre-eminentlythe mental being, the development of the mental faculties andthe richness of the mental life should be his highest aim, — hispreoccupying aim, even, as soon as he has got rid of the obsessionof the life and body and provided for the indispensablesatisfaction of the gross needs which our physical and animalnature imposes on us. Knowledge, science, art, thought, ethics,philosophy, religion, this is man’s real business, these are histrue affairs. To be is for him not merely to be born, grow up,marry, get his livelihood, support a family and then die, — thevital and physical life, a human edition of the animal round,a human enlargement of the little animal sector and arc of thedivine circle; rather to become and grow mentally and live withknowledge and power within himself as well as from withinoutward is his manhood. But there is here a double motive ofNature, an insistent duality in her human purpose. Man is hereto learn from her how to control and create; but she evidentlymeans him not only to control, create and constantly re-createin new and better forms himself, his own inner existence, hismentality, but also to control and re-create correspondingly hisenvironment. He has to turn Mind not only on itself, but onLife and Matter and the material existence; that is very clear notonly from the law and nature of the terrestrial evolution, butfrom his own past and present history. And there comes fromthe observation of these conditions and of his highest aspirationsand impulses the question whether he is not intended, notonly to expand inwardly and outwardly, but to grow upward,wonderfully exceeding himself as he has wonderfully exceededhis animal beginnings, into something more than mental, morethan human, into a being spiritual and divine. Even if he cannotdo that, yet he may have to open his mind to what is beyondit and to govern his life more and more by the light and powerthat he receives from something greater than himself. Man’s