In the light of this understanding nothing is left unclean. Even in the work of Freud, in so far as it is true, and not coloured by the overstrained interpretations of a pathologist, there is nothing to shock, though much to sadden us. Where in man there is over-emphasis of sex there is a return to the lower, animal stage. Men are regarding life in terms of what has been, and not of what shall be. They are falling short of their own possibilities. In what degree this phenomenon is pathological, due to some neurosis or psychosis, we may not judge them; in what degree their over-concentration on animal passion, to the exclusion of true spiritual activity, is under the control of the will we are in presence of sin. For, from the evolutionary point of view, sin is the refusal to live up to the standard that is at present possible, the acquiescence in a standard that belongs properly to a stage outgrown; lower; more animal, less divine. It is content with an anachronism; the willing acceptance, the welcome of failure to progress--and this means _refusal_ to progress[34]. But to see in the sex-impulse the _explanation_ of love is to fall into the same error as do the materialists, though the error has assumed a new and more subtle guise. You can no more explain love by sex than you can explain mind by matter. In both cases you are using terms to which you can attach no meaning. Ultimately I cannot think of matter and yet exclude mind; I cannot think of sex and yet exclude relation, and so, ultimately, love. For scientific purposes no doubt I can do both, for science is a process of abstraction in which we disregard everything that is not relevant to an immediate and narrow purpose. But philosophy may not abstract. She deals with the concrete and the real. We have apparently lost sight of the question of beauty; but those who have followed the thought of the first chapter will realise that we have not in fact gone far afield. Upon the foundation of sex, as we have seen, the sexless activity of love is being slowly reared; and love is relation--relation is the reciprocal, creative activity which is spirit, and spirit is Reality. God is Love; men perfected are, or will be, love. The being of God and men alike is the activity of personal relationship, made perfect in union while yet each retains his self-identity[35]. The knowledge of this relation, the expression of it, is Beauty; and in Beauty the whole theoretic activity is comprehended in the ultimate resort, when intuition, the immediate contact, and logic, the mediate contact, are made one through perfect knowledge.