The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day by Evelyn Underhill
page 70 of 265 (26%)
page 70 of 265 (26%)
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terms as threshold, complex, channel of discharge: remembering always
the central unity and non-material nature of that many-faced psychic life which is described under these various formulæ. If we accept this central unity with all its implications, it follows that we cannot take our superior and conscious faculties, set them apart, and call them "ourselves"; refusing responsibility for the more animal and less fortunate tendencies and instincts which surge up with such distressing ease and frequency from the deeps, by attributing these to nature or heredity. Indeed, more and more does it become plain that the sophisticated surface-mind which alone we usually recognize is the smallest, the least developed, and in some respects still the least important part of the real self: that whole man of impulse, thought and desire, which it is the business of religion to capture and domesticate for God. That whole man is an animal-spirit, a living, growing, plastic unit; moving towards a racial future yet unperceived by us, and carrying with him a racial past which conditions at every moment his choices, impulses and acts. Only the most rigid self-examination will disclose to us the extent in which the jungle and the Stone Age are still active in our games, our politics and our creeds; how many of our motives are still those of primitive man, and how many of our social institutions offer him a discreet opportunity of self-expression. Here, as it seems to me, is a point at which the old thoughts of religion and the new thoughts of psychology may unite and complete one another. Here the scientific conception of the psyche is merely restating the fundamental Christian paradox, that man is truly one, a living, growing spirit, the creature and child of the Divine Life; and yet that there seem to be in him, as it were, two antagonistic natures--that duality which St. Paul calls the old Adam and the new |
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