its environment. Man stands at the junction of the stages between the
purely natural and the purely spiritual. On the one hand, he is a member
of the animal world, he has its instincts, its desires and its
limitations; on the other hand, he has within him the germ of
spirituality. He belongs to both worlds, the natural and the spiritual.
He cannot shake off the 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