The Power of the Spirit 269it can now be firmly taken or will be missed once more with a
fall back to another retracing of the psychological circuit. That
will determine the character of the coming era of the mind and
life of man and consequently the character of all his methods of
aesthetic self-expression.
The one thing that man sees above the intellect is the spirit,
and therefore the developed intellect of the race, if it is at all
to go forward, must open now to an understanding and seeing
spirituality, other than the rather obscure religionism of the past
which belonged to the lower levels of the life and the emotion
and which has had its bounds broken and its narrownesses con-
demned by the free light of intellectual thought: this will be
rather an illumined self-knowledge and God-knowledge and a
world-knowledge too which transmuted in that greater light will
spiritualise the whole view and motive of our existence. That is
the one development to which an accomplished intellectualism
can open and by exceeding itself find its own right consumma-
tion. The alternative is a continual ringing of changes in the
spinnings of the intellectual circle which leads nowhere or else a
collapse to the lower levels which may bring human civilisation
down with a run to a new corrupted and intellectualised bar-
barism. This is a catastrophe which has happened before in the
world’s history, and it was brought about ostensibly by outward
events and causes, but arose essentially from an inability of the
intellect of man to find its way out of itself and out of the
vital formula in which its strainings and questionings can only
exhaust itself and life into a full illumination of the spirit and
an enlightened application of the saving spiritual principle to
mind and life and action. The possibility of such a catastrophe
is by no means absent from the present human situation. On
the one hand the straining of the intellect to its limits of elas-
ticity has brought in a recoil to a straining for unbridled vital,
emotional and sensational experience and a morbid disorder in
the economy of the nature and on the other there have come
in, perhaps as a result, perturbations of the earth system that
threaten to break up the mould of civilisation, and the problem
of the race is whether a new and greater mould can be created