Note 58 — Chapter X · ULTIMATE RESOLUTION OF THE SOCIETAL NEUROSIS IN ITS PERSONAL IMPLICATION

I hold that the word “spirit” employed in its biological connotation belongs to the legitimate equipment of the laboratory. Because the religionists have carried it off and perverted it to sentimental uses, I shall not surrender the claim of the scientist upon it. And so by “spirit” I do not wish to indicate anything akin to the ghostly itinerants reputed to stalk o’ nights, nor to that beneficent impulse that moves people to cheer the afternoon of life by “doing good” when the infelicities of age or infirmity have dulled the edge of less salutary proclivities. Neither have I in mind any philosophical concept whatever, nor least of all a conception savouring of a religious purport, all of which seem to me equally apparitional. I mean merely man’s innate, unprompted or unchecked feeling as expressive of his organic life. That which in man responds to natural beauty, actual or inferred, is of the sphere of the spirit as I use the term.