purposeful than the rhythm of work and rest which conditions, or should
condition, the healthy life of sense. This re-direction and
transfiguration, this removal to a higher term of our mental rhythm, are
of course psychic phenomena; using this word in a broad sense, without
prejudice to the discrimination of any one aspect of it as spiritual.
All that we mean at the moment is, that the change which brings in the
spiritual life is a change in the mind and heart of man, working in the
stuff of our common human nature, and involving all that the modern
psychologist means by the word psyche.

We begin therefore with the nature of the psyche as this modern,
growing, changing psychology conceives it; for this is the raw material
of regenerate man. If we exclude those merely degraded and pathological
theories which have resulted from too exclusive a study of degenerate
minds, we find that the current conception of the psyche--by which of
course I do not mean the classic conceptions of Ward or even William
James--was anticipated by Plotinus, when he said in the Fourth Ennead,
that every soul has something of the lower life for the purposes of the
body and of the higher for the purposes of the Spirit, and yet
constitutes a unity; an unbroken series of ascending values and powers
of response, from the levels of merely physical and mainly unconscious
life to those of the self-determining and creative consciousness.[62] We
first discover psychic energy as undifferentiated directive power,
controlling response and adaption to environment; and as it develops,
ever increasing the complexity of its impulses and habits, yet never
abandoning anything of its past. Instinct represents the correspondence
of this life-force with mere nature, its effort as it were to keep its
footing and accomplish its destiny in the world of time. Spirit
represents this same life acting on highest levels, with most vivid
purpose; seeking and achieving correspondence with the eternal world,