enesis, we shall be in danger of turning autobiography into
cosmology and inwardness into folly.

One of the most notable points in M. Benda's analysis is his insistence on
the leap involved in passing from infinite Being to any particular fact or
system of facts; and again the leap involved in passing, when the
converted spirit "returns to God", from specific animal interests--no
matter how generous, social, or altruistic these interests may be--to
absolute renunciation and sympathy with the absolute. "That a will to
return to God should arise in the phenomenal world seems to be a miracle
no less wonderful (though it be less wondered at) than that the world
should arise in the bosom of God." "Love of man, charity, humanitarianism
are nothing but the selfishness of the race, by which each animal species
assures its specific existence." "To surrender one's individuality for the
benefit of a larger self is something quite different from
disinterestedness; it is the exact opposite." And certainly, if we
regarded infinite Being as a cosmological medium--say, empty space and
time--there would be a miraculous break, an unaccountable new beginning,
if that glassy expanse was suddenly wrinkled by something called energy.
But in fact there need never have been such a leap, or such a miracle,
because there could never have been such a transition. Infinite Being is
not a material vacuum "in the bosom" of which a world might arise. It is a
Platonic idea--though Plato never entertained it--an essence, non-existent
and immutable, not in the same field of reality at all as a world of
moving and colliding things. Such an essence is not conceivably the seat
of the variations that enliven the world. It is only in thought that we
may pass from infinite Being to an existing universe; and when we turn
from one to the other, and say that now energy has emerged from the bosom
of God, we are turning over a new leaf, or rather picking up an entirely
different volume. The natural world is composed of objects and events
which theory may regard as transformations of a hypothetical energy; an
energy which M. Benda--who when he comes down to the physical world is a
good materialist--conceives to have condensed and distributed itself into
matter, which in turn composed organisms and ultimately generated
consciousness and reason. But in whatever manner the natural world may
have evolved, it is found and posited by us in perception and action, not,
like