polise the man, and cannot endure that anything should infringe their dominion. So far from helping to realise our personality, they do everything in their power to keep it aloof or in abeyance, and to lull man into oblivion—of himself. So far from coming into life, our personality tends to disappear, and, like water torn and beaten into invisible mist by the force of a whirlwind, it often entirely vanishes beneath the tread of the passions. Then comes reason; and perhaps you imagine that reason elevates us to the rank of personal beings. But looking at reason in itself that is, considering it as a straight, and not as a reflex act,[1] what has reason done, or what can reason do for man (we speak of kind, and not of degree, for man may have a higher degree of it than animals), which she has not also done for beavers and for bees, creatures which, though rational, are yet not personal beings? Without some other power to act as supervisor of reason, this faculty would have worked in man just as it works in animals: that is to say, it would have operated within him merely as a power of adapting means to ends, without lending him any assistance towards the realisation of his own personality. Indeed, being, like our other natural modifications, a state of monopoly of the man, it would, like them, have tended to keep down the establishment of his personal being.
Such are the chief powers that enter into league to enslave us, and to bind us down under the causal
- ↑ Above, p. 113.
