It is also erroneous to regard the gradual development of the psychical capacities at the different levels of animal evolution as the development of and preparation for the human spirit. It is not the spirit, but the raw material of it, that is thus being prepared and developed. It is as if, in the history of colour manufacture, an “evolution” of colour were taking place. The quality of the colour gradually becomes better and better. Each generation learns to make it purer and more brilliant. But the painting which is painted with the most brilliant colour cannot be regarded as a link in the evolutionary sequence, and is certainly not the crown and culmination of the pigment; the latter is only the gradual perfecting of a necessary preliminary condition.
It is only of secondary interest to point out the immense leaps in the evolution of colour and colour-technique, and especially the vast difference between the last stage and the one before it, or, to drop the metaphor, the enormous psychological differences between the animal and the human mind.
There is no doubt that an apologetic which interests itself in such matters would find abundant opportunity for work, and could find a powerful argument against a too hasty naturalism in the differences between animal and human psychical capacities, which have been recognised much more sanely and clearly through recent investigation than they usually were in earlier times. But the question has no special interest for us here.
In as far as man is endowed with a capacity for spiritual life and spiritual possession, he is likewise destined for personality. This includes and designates everything that expresses the peculiar dignity of human nature. Personality is a word which gives us an inward thrill. It expresses what is most individual in us, what is set before us, our highest task and the inmost tendency of our being. What is personality? Certainly something which is only a rudiment in us at birth, and is not then realised, and at the same time an ideal which we feel more or less indistinctly, but without being able to outline it clearly. To exhaust the idea as far as possible is the task of ethical science. But one thing at any rate we can affirm about it with certainty: it is absolutely bounded off from the whole world and all existence as a self-contained and independent world in itself. The more we become persons, the more clearly, definitely, and indissolubly we raise ourselves with our spiritual life and spiritual possessions out of all the currents of natural phenomena, the more do we cease to be mere modes of a general existence and happening that flows about us, and in which we would otherwise float with vaguely defined outlines. A microcosm forms itself in contradistinction to the macrocosm, and a unity, a monad, arises, in regard to which there is now warrant for inquiring into its duration and immortality as compared with the stream of general becoming and passing away. For what does it matter to religion whether, in addition to physical indivisible atoms, there are spiritual ones which, by reason of their simplicity, are indestructible? But that the unities which we call personalities are superior to all the manifoldness and diversity of the world, that they are not fleeting fortuitous formations among the many which evolution is always giving rise to and breaking down again, but that they are the aim and meaning of all existence, and that as such they are above the common lot of all that has only a transient meaning and a temporal worth—to inquire into all this and to affirm it is religion itself.