The evolutionist philosopher has told us that we may picture life as a rising wave opposed by the contrary movement of matter towards stability. The greater part of the whole volume of the wave, after reaching one height or another, is arrested; and going no further it is at each several height converted into the whirling eddies, the contented plants and animals of which we have already spoken. At one point only, where it rises highest, does the wave find a free passage (and of this too we have spoken) along which it carries with it, converted to its further purpose, the material obstacle, condition, and means that will, in a sense and for a time, still in some degree encumber, but cannot now arrest, its advance. The life-current continues to flow, a gathering wave of conscious life grown to self-consciousness and world-consciousness. It flows on from this point of conquest through generation after generation of men in and to whom its spiritual character is now plainly revealed. For each man it is a rill from the great human river of life—life natural and spiritual, spiritual because so fully natural—which has become his own and is indeed himself. For each the material but living brain is the chief instrument and helper by means of which he himself stretches forth towards wider and wider relations, not only with material objects but with other spiritual beings. And as the spirit of a man thus expands, amassing life and becoming, by the sympathetic spiritual inclusion of other lives, greater in its reach and in itself, it is confirmed and consolidated in its self-ownership. You may say that as a self-knowing, self-governing, creative being, an owner of means and a seeker after ends, man's life has at last taken possession of the kingdom of itself, and that it has reached this all-important status through the medium and condition of a body and by the experience of an earthly world. We will let the philosopher tell us the gist of this in his own words:—