And both in the abstract sense are purportless and ineffectual without Consciousness. They are blind, dumb forces, beautiful, barbaric pageants, careering without aim or design through the immensities of No-where and No-time, if they are not impregnated and nourished with Thought, that is to say, with Consciousness, vitalised and purified.
You may impregnate them with philosophy, nourish them with art; they both emanate from them, and remain as skidding clouds, as shining mirages, as wandering dust, until they find their exponent in Man.
“I tell thee then that Man, that is to say Consciousness, vitalised and purified, in other words Thought—that alone is real and eternal.
And Man is supreme, only when he is the proper exponent of Nature, and spirit, and God: the three divine sources from which he issues, in which he is sustained, and to which he must return.
Nature and the spiritual, without this embodied intelligence, this somatic being, called man or angel or ape, are as ermine on a wax figure.
The human factor, the exponent intelligence, the intellective and sensuous faculties, these, my Brothers, are whole, sublime, holy, only when, in a state of continuous expansion, the harmony among themselves and the affirmative ties between them and Nature, are perfect and pure.
No, the spiritual ought not and can not be free from the sensuous, even the sensual. The true life, the full life, the life, pure, robust, sublime, is that in which all the nobler and higher aspirations of the soul and the body are given free and unlimited scope, with the view of developing the divine strain in Man, and realising to some extent the romantic as well as the material hopes of the race.
God, Nature, Spirit, Passion—Passion, Spirit, Nature, God—in some such panorama would I paint the life of a highly developed being. Any of