Yet there is in truth a real difference, in these respects, between man and the insect or any other creature. In the perceptive consciousness of the insect, restricted by the fixed character of its nervous system, the intuitive potency of life has shrunk and hardened, as it were, into a restrained power which deals, and can deal, only with a very small part of life and the world. This power is forced to work in the windowless prison of a completed life. Man's life is not completed; in him consciousness, stretching out ever farther and farther, has passed one temporary limit after another, function impelling structure to match itself, mind seeking to go beyond itself. The consciousness of man has been always opening up for him new fields, adapting itself to new objects, moving among them, making a way through them, and in all its growth and change advancing in freedom. To attain this freed human consciousness seems, we may say, the motive principle of the evolution of life through man's forerunners. Its driving impulse is both carried indefinitely further in that consciousness and revealed as what it really is. Herein lies the difference in order between every animal, every plant, the most skilful of the beetles or the wasps, and man. Their way is closed. His lies before him wide open. He _is_ the open way, the one open way on earth for life in its harmony of intuitive and intellectual power both fulfilled. And if hitherto we and our forefathers have in practice over-emphasized conceptual thinking and the intellect, our over-emphasis and its practical results have set us in a place where sympathetic intuition in perceptive experience has a new advantage. In us it will not, or rather it need not, be narrowed down. It may stretch out into every field that discursive and reflective thought has opened up, and it may pass beyond them to lead them on. The attainment by man of his high calling and of the destiny of which he is capable depends in truth on this expansion of his life. So the philosopher assures us. So, also—and this is noteworthy—does the psychologist: 'with the development of "psychical integration" both sides develop, and their relation, that is experience, therefore expands into a meaning inclusive of more and more, till, in the human being, it may be inclusive of all things actual and possible, the universe in space, and history in time from the remotest past, and, in imagination, to the most distant future.' The psychologist too, is not without his vision. ------- CHAPTER V