Although limited to that life the cell may literally be said to be man’s image—but an image of a very singular kind. The cell does not reproduce man’s traits as does a photograph or a statue, but within its lower realm it mirrors the fundamental qualities of the original on a very reduced scale.
These limitations can not be conceived by the cell as such because they are natural to it and belong to its entity. The cell is and must feel itself as perfect in its realm as man in his. Only if the cell could compare its conditions with man’s, these limitations would be apparent to it, and such a comparison the cell really undertakes within certain limits. Into each feeling of want enters a comparison between the possessed and the desired. In the higher wants, then, that drive the cells to upbuild man’s organism we have a manifestation of such a comparing power of the cell. Experience shows that the cell may live in a veritable natural state, but it is also, because of the presence of the soul in its innermost being, capable of a high culture for the development of which it receives constant impulses and stimulations from the soul.
In the same sense man may be said to be the image of God. Living in the world and the natural state, to which he is confined by his relatively imperfect organism, man has the qualities of God with corresponding limitations. But even in this state he feels the spirit of God present in him because he is an original part of God’s own organism. In his conscience and in his religious feeling man not only comprehends distinctly the presence of God in his inner being but constantly receives also impulses, incitements and inspirations to develop that perfect life and heavenly kingdom, of which he is called by his high origin and divine birth to become a citizen.
What the conscience and the religious feelings are to the will, the logical laws of thinking are to the reason, and in the latter, man finds God as immediately present as in the former. Indeed, logical laws are the form in which God himself exists.
Because of God’s presence in the eternal laws of our thinking, man is able to appraise himself and his condition with an absolute measure, and can in this way obtain a certain knowledge of God’s world and of his perfect qualities. He has only to abstract all wants and limitations from such qualities as have a positive content, because lack of want is perfectness. We shall now undertake such a valuation with respect to man’s need of evolution here in time, which quality, as all the others, can be explained and understood only through its connection with the corresponding quality in the absolute being.
It is as natural to God to be without an origin and an evolution as it is to man to have them, and we might therefore ask how man in this respect can have anything in common with God, a condition which, as we remember, was indispensable for any comparison whatever. To make this point clear we may express ourselves in a more familiar way. We might speak of time and existence in time, instead of origin and evolution, as the latter are only forms of time.
Is there then a moment in time that has a corresponding meaning for God and the limitations of which we must abstract in order to understand God’s quality of being eternal? It is by analyzing the relation between time and eternity that we hope to receive an answer to the question why man must undergo an evolution in time.
The most conspicuous want in all that exists in time is its lack of duration; everything has a beginning and an end. With this lack of duration a corresponding lack of reality follows. The real is real, only as long as it lasts or only in the present moment. Everything past has ceased to exist and is therefore no longer real, and the future is unreal because it has not entered the present.
The real in time is identical with the present, which therefore must be the moment most like eternity and the limitations of which we have to remove.