They are blended. And such blending usually
operates to the disparagement of the person; for things being more
numerous, and their laws more urgent, the powers of man become lost in
those of nature. Or if distinction is made, and men in some dim
fashion become aware that they are different from things, still it is
the tendency of paganism to subordinate person to nature. The child is
sacrificed to the sun. The sun is not thought of as existing for the
child. From the Christian point of view everything seems turned upside
down. Man is absorbed in natural forces, natural forces are reverenced
as divine, and self-consciousness--if noticed at all--is regarded as
an impertinent accident.
In the Christian ideal all this is reversed. Man is called to be
master of himself, and therefore of all else. The many beautiful
adjustments of the natural world are thought to possess dignity only
so far as they accept the conscious purposes put by us in their
keeping. And in man himself goodness is held to exist only in
proportion as his conduct expresses fullness of self-consciousness,
fullness of direction, and fullness of conscious conjunction with
other persons. I do not see how we can escape this conclusion. The
careful argumentation through which the previous chapters have brought
us obliges us to count conduct valuable in proportion as it bears the
impress of self-conscious mind.
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