But this does not exhaust the possibilities of
his nature. He has himself the reality of his own self-consciousness,
his own spiritual existence to consider. Consequently, he can never rest
satisfied with any purely naturalistic interpretation of himself. The
step of realizing the importance of mental constructions to interpret
the impressions of the external world, and the applying them to
practical needs, was a great advance. Much greater progress, however, is
there in man's realization of qualities within himself which transcend
the ordinary dead level of experience, the recognition of the spiritual
value of his own nature, of himself as a personality, capable even amid
the fluctuations of the world about him, and the illusions of sense
impressions, of obtaining a foretaste of eternity by a life that has the
infinite and the eternal as its inheritance; "He hath set eternity in
the heart of man." Man craves other values in life than the purely
scientific. "There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt
of" in the philosophies of the materialist or the naturalist. Bergson
assures us that the future belongs to a philosophy which will take into
account THE WHOLE of what is given. Transcending Body and Intellect is
the life of the Spirit, with needs beyond either bodily satisfaction or
intellectual needs craving its development, satisfaction and fuller
realization. The man who seeks merely bodily satisfaction lives the life
of the animal; even the man who poses as an intellectual finds himself
entangled ultimately in relativity, missing the uniqueness of all
things--his own life included.
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