It has in fact to face the frightful struggle of self-consciousness, or the disentanglement of the true self from the fleeting and perishable self. The animals and man, unfallen, are healthy and free from care, but unaware of what they are; to attain self-knowledge man must fall; he must become less than his true self; he must endure imperfection; division and strife must enter his nature. To realise the perfect Life, to know what, how wonderful it is--to understand that all blessedness and freedom consists in its possession--he must for the moment suffer divorce from it; the unity, the repose of his nature must be broken up, crime, disease and unrest must enter in, and by contrast he must attain to knowledge. Curious that at the very dawn of the Greek and with it the European civilisation we have the mystic words "Know Thyself" inscribed on the temple of the Delphic Apollo; and that first among the legends of the Semitic race stands that of Adam and Eve eating of the tree of the Knowledge of good and evil! To the animal there is no such knowledge, to the early man there was no such knowledge, and to the perfected man of the future there will be no such knowledge. It is a temporary perversion, indicating the disunion of the present-day man--the disunion of the outer self from the inner--the horrible dual self-consciousness--which is the means ultimately of a more perfect and conscious union than could ever have been realised without it--the death that is swallowed up in victory. "For the first man is of the earth, earthy; but the second man is the Lord from heaven." In order then, at this point in his Evolution, to advance any farther, Man must first fall; in order to know, he must lose. In order to realise what Health is, how splendid and glorious a possession, he must go through all the long negative experience of Disease; in order to know the perfect social life, to understand what power and happiness to mankind are involved in their true relation to each other, he must learn the misery and suffering which come from mere individualism and greed; and in order to find his true Manhood, to discover what a wonderful power it is, he must first lose it--he must become a prey and a slave to his own passions and desires--whirled away like Phaethon by the horses which he cannot control. This moment of divorce, then, this parenthesis in human progress, covers the ground of all History; and the whole of Civilisation, and all crime and disease, are only the materials of its immense purpose--themselves destined to pass away as they arose, but to leave their fruits eternal.