It subserves the evolution of Self-consciousness and of the sense of Identity. It is obvious that diffused faculties and perceptions, however swift and powerful, could never have brought these gifts with them. It was only by pinning sensitiveness down to a point in space and time, by means of a body, and limiting its perceptions by means of bodily end-organs, that these new values could be added to creation—the local self and the sense of Identity. All the variety of human and animal nature, all the endless differences of points of view, all diversity and charm of form and character and temperament must be credited to this principle; and whatever vagaries and delusions the consequent growth of self-consciousness and selfness may have caused, it is incontestable that through the development of Identity mankind and all creation must ultimately rise to a height of glory and splendor otherwise unimaginable.
And not only limitation but also hindrance. These things give an intensity and passion to life, and a power and decisiveness to individuality, the absence of which would indeed be sad. As a water-conduit by limiting the spread of the stream and confining it in a close channel gives it velocity and force to drive the mill, so limitation and hindrance in human life give the individualized energy from which, for good or evil, all our world-activities spring. As the Lord says in Goethe’s Prologue to Faust:—
“Of all the spirits of denial
The mischief-maker I most tolerate,
For man’s activity doth all too soon unravel;
Of slumber he seems never satiate;
Therefore I gladly hand him to a mate
Who’ll plague and prick, and play in fact the Devil.”
Over a long period in this cosmic process this action, we may think, goes on. The vast and pervasive soul-stuff of the universe, in its hidden way omniscient and omnipresent, suffers an obscuration and a limitation, and is condensed into a bodily prison in a point of space and time; but with a consequent explosive energy incalculable. The Devil—diabolos the slanderer and the sunderer, the principle of division—reigns. To him, the ‘milk and water’ heaven of universal but vague benevolence is detestable. He builds up the actual, fascinating, tragic, indispensable world that we know. Selfishness and ignorance, the two great Powers of discord and separation, are his ministers; the earth is his theatre of convulsive hatreds and soul-racking passion; and our mortal life, instead of being the fair channel of cosmic activities, becomes a “stricture knot,” as Whitman calls it, and a symbol of disease.