What lives in us, as far as we can perceive and trace it in its empirical expression, is not a finished and spiritual being that leaps, mature and complete, from some pre-existence or other into its embodied form, but is obviously something that only develops and becomes actual very gradually. Its becoming is conditioned by “stimuli,” influences, impressions from without, and perfects itself in the closest dependence upon the becoming of the body, is inhibited or advanced with it, and may be entirely arrested by it, forced into abnormal developments which never attain to the level of an “ego” or “personality,” but remain incomprehensible anomalies and monstrosities. In general, the psychical struggles slowly and laboriously free from purely vegetative and physiological processes, and gains control over itself and over the body. Its self-development and concentration to full unity and completeness of personality is only achieved through the deepest self-culture, through complete “simplification” as the ancients said, through great acts and experiences of inward centralisation such as that which finds religious expression in the metaphor of “regeneration.” What “building up” and self-development of the psychical means remains obscure. If we think of it as a summation, an adding on of new parts and constituents, and thus try to form a concrete image of the process, we spoil it altogether. If we speak of the transition from the potential to the actual, [pg 299] from the tendency to the realisation, we may not indeed spoil it, but we have done little to make the process more intelligible. So much only we can say: certain as it is that the Psyche, especially as conscious inner life, only gradually develops and becomes actual, and that in the closest dependence upon the development, maturing, and establishment of the nervous basis and the bodily organisation in general, yet the naturalistic view, a fortiori the materialistic, is never at any point correct. There are three things to be borne in mind. First, the origin, the “whence” of the psychical is wholly hidden from us, and, notwithstanding the theory of evolution and descent, it remains an insoluble riddle. And secondly, however closely it is associated with and tied down to the processes of bodily development, it is never at any stage of its development really a function of it in actual and exact correspondence and dependence. And finally, the further it advances in its self-realisation, the further the relation of dependence recedes into the background, and the more do the independence and autonomy of the psychical processes become prominent.

We have still to consider and amplify this in several respects, and then we may go on to still more important matters.