This spiritual nature, which from the beginning has sought after its
Creator that it might worship him, is not a thing apart, living in a
separate “house,” but rather a phase of man’s complexity. It depends
for its growth upon both the physical and mental sides of man’s
nature, and cannot be divorced from them.
At the foot of the path that reaches to the very height of spiritual
life, we find feeling as sensation and emotion. The myriad sensations
which express themselves in bodily consciousness through the physical,
and the emotions which find expression through mental consciousness,
can not escape their share of responsibility for the development of
the spiritual side. As year after year he sees successive classes of
children repeat the development of their predecessors, one stands in
awe and reverence before the presence of laws which seem universal in
the development of child life. He notes the days when life means food
and clothing furnished by another. He notes the strong development of
the self interests to the exclusion of others. He sees the gradual
development of the sense of justice, of pity, of sympathy. He watches
the development of altruism in adolescence. He sees the rapid change
of body, mind, and spirit, and witnesses the struggle for control,
sometimes on the part of one, sometimes the other, until at last
physical, mental or spiritual emerges in control of a life. Or in the
rarer cases, where a more perfect development has come, all three work
together in the effort to make a perfectly balanced man.
We saw in our brief study of the physical side that a girl in her
teens can feel. Her whole being is sensitized, ready at a moment’s
notice to respond. In our study of the mental side we saw that she can
and does think, is capable of the heights and depths of emotion, and
is able in a limited way to make comparisons and reach sane
conclusions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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