more and more intense as he realizes the magnitude of the force against
which he is contending. Then as he begins to realize the inequality of the
struggle he seeks for extraneous aid, and so he falls back on various
expedients, all of which have this in common that they ultimately amount to
invoking the assistance of other individualities, not seeing that this
involves the same fallacy which has brought him to his present straits, the
fallacy, namely, of supposing that any individuality can develop a power
greater than that of the source from which itself proceeds. The fallacy is
a radical one; and therefore all efforts based upon it are fore-doomed to
ultimate failure, whether they take the form of reliance on personal force
of will, or magical rites, or austerity practised against the body, or
attempts by abnormal concentration to absorb the individual in the
universal, or the invocation of spirits, or any other method--the same
fallacy is involved in them all, that the less is larger than the greater.

Now the point to be noted is that the idea of transcending the present
conditions of humanity does not necessarily imply the idea of transcending
the normal law of humanity. The mistake we have hitherto made has been in
fixing the Standard of Personality too low and in taking our past
experiences as measuring the ultimate possibilities of the race. Our
liberty consists in our ability to form our own conception of the Normal
Standard of Personality, only subject to the conditions arising out of the
inherent Law of the underlying Universal Mind; and so the whole thing
resolves itself into the question, What are those fundamental conditions?
The Law is that we cannot transcend the Normal; therefore comes the
question, What is the Normal?

I have endeavored to answer this question in the chapter on the Divine
Ideal, but since this is the crucial point of the whole subject we may
devote a little further attention to it. The Normal Standard of Personality