We have seen that the Spirit's Enjoyment of Life is necessarily a
_reciprocal_--it must have a corresponding fact in manifestation to answer
to it; otherwise by the inherent law of mind no consciousness, and
consequently no enjoyment, could accrue; and therefore by the law of
continuous progression the required Reciprocal should manifest as a being
awakening to the consciousness of the principle by which he himself comes
into existence.
Such an awakening cannot proceed from a comparison of one set of existing
conditions with another, but only from the recognition of a Power which is
independent of all conditions, that is to say, the absolute Self-dependence
of the Spirit. A being thus awakened would be the proper correspondence of
the Spirit's Enjoyment of Life at a stage not only above mechanical motion
or physical vitality, but even above intellectual perception of existing
phenomena, that is to say at the stage where the Spirit's Enjoyment
consists in recognizing itself as the Source of all things. The position in
the Absolute would be, so to speak, the awakening of Spirit to the
recognition of its own Artistic Ability. I use the word "Artistic" as more
nearly expressing an almost unstatable idea than any other I can think of,
for the work of the artist approaches more closely to creation _ex nihilo_
than any other form of human activity.
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