Neither do the two aspects run together in life in parallel lines. On the contrary, the spiritual life cannot manifest itself at all until a certain stage of development is reached in nature. It would seem impossible to conceive of the animal rising above its animal instincts and tendencies; its whole life is conditioned by its animal nature and its environment. Man stands at the junction of the stages between the purely natural and the purely spiritual. On the one hand, he is a member of the animal world, he has its instincts, its desires and its limitations; on the other hand, he has within him the germ of spirituality. He belongs to both worlds, the natural and the spiritual. He cannot shake off the natural and remain a man--to separate the two means death to man as we know him. But there is a great difference between his position in the natural world and his position in the spiritual world. He seems to be the last word in the world of nature, he has reached heights far beyond those reached by any other flesh and blood. He is, so far as we know, the culminating point of natural evolution--the final possibility in the natural world. But the stage of nature only represents the first stage in the development of the universe. There is an infinitely higher stage of life, the spiritual life. And if man is the final point of progress in the world of nature, he is, in his primitive state, only at the threshold of the spiritual world. But he is not an entire stranger to the spiritual--the germ is in him, and the spiritual is consequently not an alien world for him. If the spiritual were something entirely foreign it would be vain to expect much progress through mere impulses from without. On the contrary, it is the spiritual that makes man really great, and is the most fundamental part of his nature. The two stages of life, then, are present in man--the natural and the spiritual; the former highly developed, the latter, at first, in an undeveloped state. Now the great aim of the universe is to pass gradually from the natural to the spiritual plane of life. This does not mean that the latter is the product of the former stage, for this is not the case. It means that the deeper reality in life is the spiritual, and that the spiritual develops through the natural in its own particular way. And this particular way is not a mere development but a _self_-development. The aim of the spiritual is to develop its own self through the human being. In this way man is given the possibility of developing a self--a personality in a very real sense.