jacobin1949
14th December 2007, 23:20
http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jlawler/cours...20Force%202.doc (http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jlawler/courses/phi380/assets/documents/6%20Dialectics%20of%20the%20Force%202.doc)
Spirit: Hegel’s Distillation of the History of Religion
Like George Lucas, Hegel attempts to distill the essence of religion in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion and other works. Religion, he argues, is distinguished from science and philosophy in being a matter of feeling and “picture thinking,” rather than of rationality and conceptual thought. The object of religion may be called God or Absolute Spirit, but for the religious person such terms are labels for a peculiar object of feeling and imagination, not primarily concepts for rational inquiry. The ultimate goal of the philosophy of religion is to justify the truth of religious feeling by explaining the reality that it taps into—the all-encompassing and dynamic reality of what Hegel calls Spirit.3 Each civilization has its own religious picture of the ultimate Source of reality, the divine, the Tao, Brahman, Yahweh, the Father God, Allah, the Absolute Spirit. The distinguishing features of this picture in different societies reflect the kind of civilization each one is, and the stage of humanity’s self-development that the particular civilization ultimately represents. A scientific-technological civilization that puts Matter and the creative power of Chance in place of an intentionally acting Spirit is no exception to this rule.
Hegel traces a developmental pattern in the historical succession of religious beliefs, one that produces in effect a distillation of divinity. In the succession of basic religious orientations, what one religion calls good another religion denounces as evil or darkness. But for the final distillation to appear it is necessary for the human spirit, on its heroic journey to self-fulfillment, to find the balance between these opposites.
Human history begins with the divine in nature, as human beings living off plants and animals in the wild are immersed in the natural world. For such people there is no separation between the divine and the human. Like the spirits of nature whose presence they find in dreams and evoke through vivid paintings in the deep womb of caves, human beings too wield a magical Force in controlling the world around them by their wishes and in their dream fantasies. This is the childhood of humanity, Hegel says. The mindset of the child, who willingly enters the fantasy of “once upon a time,” is the general outlook of the earliest human cultures. As Yoda remarks in Attack of the Clones, “Truly wonderful the mind of a child.” This is also the general outlook of all the ancient nature-centered cultures of the East, as exemplified in the Taoism of China, whose symbol is the unity of dark and light, yin and yang. Giving expression to this history, Star Wars appropriately culminates in Episode 6, Return of the Jedi, with the battle between the monstrosities of the most advanced technological civilization and the slings and arrows of the nature people, the Ewoks. These simple people of the forest readily take the gleaming C-3P0 as a god. As a product of the advanced civilization, though, the gentleman droid lacks the power of imagination capable of accepting this worship: “It’s against my programming to impersonate a deity.”
In the next major stage of human history, which takes place primarily in the West, no one could mistake a physical object for a god. Human beings have developed far greater technological powers over nature, together with mighty systems of economic, social, and political power in which a small number of people have immense control over the lives of the majority. Consequently, the divine is conceived of in the image of the rulers—as a remote power radically separate from and ruling over the world. The progress of such separation between the higher realm of the gods and the lower world of nature and humans culminates in the slave empire of the ancient Romans. This slave state, which subjects all conquered peoples to an order based on the might of the Roman army, reduces everything sacred in life to an object of utility for political purposes. Star Wars, with its portrayal of the slide from Republic to Empire, borrows liberally from this Roman history—while suggesting parallels with our own time. Hegel calls this Roman religion, the Religion of Expediency.4
We therefore see two opposite forms of religion in early world history. From the earliest societies and the East, there is the divine as an all-pervading natural force capable of emerging in the most unexpected objects, as in the Ewoks’ vision of C-3P0 as a god. From the beginnings of Western civilizations the contrary concept emerges of “an alien Being who passes judgement on the particular individual” from the inaccessible position of an “unattainable Beyond.”5 In the presence of this externalized or alienated expression of its own inner being, the “consciousness of life … is conscious only of its own nothingness.”6 If there is to be a distillation of the essence of religion as the core of a new myth for our time, it must reconcile and combine these two opposite conceptions of the divine. Just such a synthesis, Hegel argues, is represented by the “Consummate Religion” of Christianity with its story of a God Who descends from His lofty heaven to become a human babe, who grows up with a family, enters upon his mission, and accomplishes this mission only by dying the ignominious death on Mount Calvary of a criminal nailed to a cross.7
What is this mission? To teach a people plunged in the darkness of a world ruled by pitiless physical force that the true God is not a menacing power ruling over us, but the deepest inner reality of each person. This reality is the Holy Spirit that is capable of binding us all together as a powerful Force capable of transforming our world. Connected to this Spirit and to one another, we are capable of wielding an irresistible Force for resisting and overcoming all inner darkness and every outer unjust form of rule. Thus, at the peak of the imperial power of Rome, intrepid bands of Christian rebels, believing that divine Force has merged with the human spirit, began the long climb from a world of Empire whose principle is that only one person is free, the Emperor, to a world whose dominant inspiration is that all should be free to rule themselves. Hegel calls this evolution from tyranny to freedom “the march of God in the world.”8 The defenders of liberty can therefore justly say, in the language of Star Wars, that the Force is with us. It is with us—a people united in the spirit of creative freedom and mutual love. For this is the nature of Spirit, according to Hegel. It is the Force that runs through us all together—especially when we are together. It is truly understood only when we overcome the darkness cast by our separation from one another, by imprisonment in our paltry egotism—only when we learn the ultimate and unconquerable power that binds us together, the power of love.
From Matter to Spirit: The Life Force as the Origin of Human Consciousness
In Hegel’s Phenomenology, the emergence of the separate ego is described after the chapter on the life of nature. For Hegel, the human being is indeed, and fundamentally, nature’s priest, i.e., nature that has become aware of itself and can appreciate itself consciously. Hegel explains the dialectical logic by which the Life-Force of unconscious nature gives rise to self-consciousness.
In the natural world, he argues, individuality and species universality exist in a polarity of interdependent tendencies. Individual plants and animals reproduce the species through producing other individuals of a similar kind. By this means, nature perpetuates itself as the species, which exists as a totality that is relatively separate from the individuals who produce it. The species or genus, or organic nature as a whole, maintains an immortal or super-mortal life through the dissolution or death of the individuals that produce it. “Life,” Hegel writes in his condensed form of expression, “consists rather in being the self-developing whole which dissolves its development and in this movement simply preserves itself.”9 In contrast to the mortal individual, the species is a kind of living universality. It is the particular Life-Force that is both the product of each individual and the larger whole that unconsciously governs the life of the individual. We recognize in Hegel’s account of Life the definition of the Force of Star Wars: “It’s an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together.”
What is missing from this definition are individuals who can consciously connect to the Force. The individual plant or animal does indeed connect with the species, but unconsciously—through its species instincts. At the level of its own conscious awareness, the individual organism is preoccupied with its own individual life—e.g., preoccupied with finding food for the day, for itself and possibly for its immediate family. It is not concerned with the life of the species as a whole, even while through instinct it unconsciously or indirectly gives rise to and perpetuates that life. In moral language, the individual of a natural species is not conscious of a duty or a responsibility to the species as a whole. On the other hand, the species is itself an unconscious Life-force that maintains a form of existence of its own. However, in the species, life “does not exist for itself.”10 The species Life Force which the individuals produce exists “in itself” but it is not something “for” the individual and so also not something “for itself.” The particular species, and by extension Nature as a whole, exists through the individuals who serve it as a quasi-independent force. But as it lacks real individuality, it fails to appreciate its own life. In the natural world of plant and animal life, individuality and species life therefore go their relatively separate ways, in an unstable, dynamic polarity of interdependent aspects. Logically speaking, they constitute a kind of thesis and antithesis, and as such they implicitly call for their synthesis.
In this separation of narrowly conscious individuality and an unconscious, quasi-independent universality that arises out of the many individuals, the life of nature implicitly points beyond itself to a form of existence that unifies its two sides: “Life points to something other than itself, viz. to consciousness, for which Life exists as this unity, or as genus. …”11 Arising out of this polarity of individuality and species life is the higher form of consciousness, human self-consciousness, in which the genus or species becomes something existing for itself. Through the individual human consciousness that it evolves into, the Life Force becomes truly aware of itself. Thus is created a being that transcends the narrow confines of its individual life through its intrinsic connection to the universality and immortality of the Life Force. A higher form of consciousness emerges, human self-consciousness, that is implicitly concerned with its species life as a whole. The fully self-conscious human being therefore experiences a duty to promote humanity as a whole in a conscious way. Human consciousness is intrinsically historical, connecting more or less consciously to the evolution of the human species through many forms and stages of development. Through and in such species consciousness, the individual essentially persists through multiple limited embodiments or lifetimes because the human individual is an expression of Life itself. The self-conscious human being is the immortal Life Force become individualized and aware of itself. Each individual human being is therefore a unique expression of the multiple potentialities of Life itself. Thus as we reflect back on the history of mankind, thanks to dialectical science, we recognize our own personal history in its broadest outlines. We identify with this history, and see our individual ontogeny in one lifetime illuminated by the phylogeny, the history, of humanity itself.
From Spirit to Matter: Involution as the Basis of Evolution
But how is it that unconscious Life is able to give rise to conscious self-awareness? How can the higher forms of consciousness come out of lower forms of unconsciousness? How does something that purposefully moves itself emerge from what does not so move itself? Kant could not explain how the teleological purposefulness of human life could be seen in the natural world, which science supposes is governed by outside causality. Hence he regarded the teleological viewpoint as a projection of human purposes onto nature, even while recognizing that in the sciences of biology a teleological perspective, in which the parts are viewed as working for the good of the larger whole, is a quite natural assumption. However, he thought, if science is essentially about external causal forces, then viewing purposefulness in organic nature must be regarded as unscientific, as a projection of human purposefulness onto nature. Such projection need not be false, for reality as it is in itself is unknowable. But we cannot claim that a teleological view of nature is a matter of science. It arises out of the postulates of morality which require that the Highest Good be seen as realizable, and so as effectively being realized, not only in human history, but in the natural world which is an essential condition of human life.
From Hegel’s perspective of a dialectical science, it is necessary to look at the circle or spiral of cause and effect at the level of the larger totality, where what is effect can be regarded in turn as cause. Human self-consciousness as we have just seen is the effect of the evolution of Life, expressing in a new and higher form the unity of the polar sides of the life process. But this means that the higher form of development of Life, which is human self-consciousness, was somehow already implicit in the lower form of organic life itself. Human consciousness is implicit in the dialectic of organic life as the emerging synthesis of its conflicting tendencies. Similarly, Life too arises out of the polarities of inorganic matter. For matter is not inert, moved only when one inert body collides with another, as the early modern physics of external causality proposes. A better expression of the nature of matter, Hegel thought, is found in the phenomenon of magnetism, with polar forces of attraction and repulsion operating across fields of relationships. Life is capable of arising out of inorganic matter because the self-movement of life is potentially contained within the self-moving dynamics of the polarized, magnetizing, attracting and repelling forces of matter itself. But if life is potentially self-consciousness, and matter is potentially life, then self-consciousness, whose highest form as we will see is Spirit, is already present within the darkest, densest forms of matter, waiting to be awakened out of its sleep in the dynamics of evolution.
On the one hand therefore we are investigating the dialectical processes that give birth to the highest forms of Spirit, emerging within human consciousness. But the effect is in turn also the cause. Evolution presupposes “involution.” Spirit arises out of matter because it is already contained within it, and is the operating dynamic Force of the entire evolutionary process. The ultimate nature of Matter, therefore, is Spirit, but a Spirit that has become the seeming opposite of itself, a light devolving into darkness, in order to evolve from it with a new appreciation of itself. Spirit must descend into matter, become matter, in order to return to Itself. Evolution of consciousness out of matter requires that matter be already proto-conscious or implicit consciousness, already the embodiment of spirit. Evolution presupposes “involution” or “emanation.”12
In this way the Creator does not create out of nothing, but out of Herself, the divine womb or Source of the universe. As we have seen in the previous chapter, in Asian thought the creation proceeds from the Source and returns to the Source. The neo-Platonic philosophers called this doctrine of creation “emanation.” Hegel’s dialectical science of creation interprets the Christian doctrine of the Trinity in just this way: the Son, representing finite creation, proceeds from the Father-Source, becomes lost in the apparent non-divinity of the material world, and then returns to the Source in the unity of the Holy Spirit. God does not impossibly create something out of nothing, for out of nothing can come nothing. The material of creation must be the God-Force itself. The forces of inorganic matter from which the evolutionary process begins must therefore be the God-force in an undeveloped, enveloped, unconscious form. Only by supposing that the higher is already present, implicitly or potentially “involved” in the lower forms of matter, can we explain how the higher forms are able to “evolve” from the lower.
Spirit: Hegel’s Distillation of the History of Religion
Like George Lucas, Hegel attempts to distill the essence of religion in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion and other works. Religion, he argues, is distinguished from science and philosophy in being a matter of feeling and “picture thinking,” rather than of rationality and conceptual thought. The object of religion may be called God or Absolute Spirit, but for the religious person such terms are labels for a peculiar object of feeling and imagination, not primarily concepts for rational inquiry. The ultimate goal of the philosophy of religion is to justify the truth of religious feeling by explaining the reality that it taps into—the all-encompassing and dynamic reality of what Hegel calls Spirit.3 Each civilization has its own religious picture of the ultimate Source of reality, the divine, the Tao, Brahman, Yahweh, the Father God, Allah, the Absolute Spirit. The distinguishing features of this picture in different societies reflect the kind of civilization each one is, and the stage of humanity’s self-development that the particular civilization ultimately represents. A scientific-technological civilization that puts Matter and the creative power of Chance in place of an intentionally acting Spirit is no exception to this rule.
Hegel traces a developmental pattern in the historical succession of religious beliefs, one that produces in effect a distillation of divinity. In the succession of basic religious orientations, what one religion calls good another religion denounces as evil or darkness. But for the final distillation to appear it is necessary for the human spirit, on its heroic journey to self-fulfillment, to find the balance between these opposites.
Human history begins with the divine in nature, as human beings living off plants and animals in the wild are immersed in the natural world. For such people there is no separation between the divine and the human. Like the spirits of nature whose presence they find in dreams and evoke through vivid paintings in the deep womb of caves, human beings too wield a magical Force in controlling the world around them by their wishes and in their dream fantasies. This is the childhood of humanity, Hegel says. The mindset of the child, who willingly enters the fantasy of “once upon a time,” is the general outlook of the earliest human cultures. As Yoda remarks in Attack of the Clones, “Truly wonderful the mind of a child.” This is also the general outlook of all the ancient nature-centered cultures of the East, as exemplified in the Taoism of China, whose symbol is the unity of dark and light, yin and yang. Giving expression to this history, Star Wars appropriately culminates in Episode 6, Return of the Jedi, with the battle between the monstrosities of the most advanced technological civilization and the slings and arrows of the nature people, the Ewoks. These simple people of the forest readily take the gleaming C-3P0 as a god. As a product of the advanced civilization, though, the gentleman droid lacks the power of imagination capable of accepting this worship: “It’s against my programming to impersonate a deity.”
In the next major stage of human history, which takes place primarily in the West, no one could mistake a physical object for a god. Human beings have developed far greater technological powers over nature, together with mighty systems of economic, social, and political power in which a small number of people have immense control over the lives of the majority. Consequently, the divine is conceived of in the image of the rulers—as a remote power radically separate from and ruling over the world. The progress of such separation between the higher realm of the gods and the lower world of nature and humans culminates in the slave empire of the ancient Romans. This slave state, which subjects all conquered peoples to an order based on the might of the Roman army, reduces everything sacred in life to an object of utility for political purposes. Star Wars, with its portrayal of the slide from Republic to Empire, borrows liberally from this Roman history—while suggesting parallels with our own time. Hegel calls this Roman religion, the Religion of Expediency.4
We therefore see two opposite forms of religion in early world history. From the earliest societies and the East, there is the divine as an all-pervading natural force capable of emerging in the most unexpected objects, as in the Ewoks’ vision of C-3P0 as a god. From the beginnings of Western civilizations the contrary concept emerges of “an alien Being who passes judgement on the particular individual” from the inaccessible position of an “unattainable Beyond.”5 In the presence of this externalized or alienated expression of its own inner being, the “consciousness of life … is conscious only of its own nothingness.”6 If there is to be a distillation of the essence of religion as the core of a new myth for our time, it must reconcile and combine these two opposite conceptions of the divine. Just such a synthesis, Hegel argues, is represented by the “Consummate Religion” of Christianity with its story of a God Who descends from His lofty heaven to become a human babe, who grows up with a family, enters upon his mission, and accomplishes this mission only by dying the ignominious death on Mount Calvary of a criminal nailed to a cross.7
What is this mission? To teach a people plunged in the darkness of a world ruled by pitiless physical force that the true God is not a menacing power ruling over us, but the deepest inner reality of each person. This reality is the Holy Spirit that is capable of binding us all together as a powerful Force capable of transforming our world. Connected to this Spirit and to one another, we are capable of wielding an irresistible Force for resisting and overcoming all inner darkness and every outer unjust form of rule. Thus, at the peak of the imperial power of Rome, intrepid bands of Christian rebels, believing that divine Force has merged with the human spirit, began the long climb from a world of Empire whose principle is that only one person is free, the Emperor, to a world whose dominant inspiration is that all should be free to rule themselves. Hegel calls this evolution from tyranny to freedom “the march of God in the world.”8 The defenders of liberty can therefore justly say, in the language of Star Wars, that the Force is with us. It is with us—a people united in the spirit of creative freedom and mutual love. For this is the nature of Spirit, according to Hegel. It is the Force that runs through us all together—especially when we are together. It is truly understood only when we overcome the darkness cast by our separation from one another, by imprisonment in our paltry egotism—only when we learn the ultimate and unconquerable power that binds us together, the power of love.
From Matter to Spirit: The Life Force as the Origin of Human Consciousness
In Hegel’s Phenomenology, the emergence of the separate ego is described after the chapter on the life of nature. For Hegel, the human being is indeed, and fundamentally, nature’s priest, i.e., nature that has become aware of itself and can appreciate itself consciously. Hegel explains the dialectical logic by which the Life-Force of unconscious nature gives rise to self-consciousness.
In the natural world, he argues, individuality and species universality exist in a polarity of interdependent tendencies. Individual plants and animals reproduce the species through producing other individuals of a similar kind. By this means, nature perpetuates itself as the species, which exists as a totality that is relatively separate from the individuals who produce it. The species or genus, or organic nature as a whole, maintains an immortal or super-mortal life through the dissolution or death of the individuals that produce it. “Life,” Hegel writes in his condensed form of expression, “consists rather in being the self-developing whole which dissolves its development and in this movement simply preserves itself.”9 In contrast to the mortal individual, the species is a kind of living universality. It is the particular Life-Force that is both the product of each individual and the larger whole that unconsciously governs the life of the individual. We recognize in Hegel’s account of Life the definition of the Force of Star Wars: “It’s an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together.”
What is missing from this definition are individuals who can consciously connect to the Force. The individual plant or animal does indeed connect with the species, but unconsciously—through its species instincts. At the level of its own conscious awareness, the individual organism is preoccupied with its own individual life—e.g., preoccupied with finding food for the day, for itself and possibly for its immediate family. It is not concerned with the life of the species as a whole, even while through instinct it unconsciously or indirectly gives rise to and perpetuates that life. In moral language, the individual of a natural species is not conscious of a duty or a responsibility to the species as a whole. On the other hand, the species is itself an unconscious Life-force that maintains a form of existence of its own. However, in the species, life “does not exist for itself.”10 The species Life Force which the individuals produce exists “in itself” but it is not something “for” the individual and so also not something “for itself.” The particular species, and by extension Nature as a whole, exists through the individuals who serve it as a quasi-independent force. But as it lacks real individuality, it fails to appreciate its own life. In the natural world of plant and animal life, individuality and species life therefore go their relatively separate ways, in an unstable, dynamic polarity of interdependent aspects. Logically speaking, they constitute a kind of thesis and antithesis, and as such they implicitly call for their synthesis.
In this separation of narrowly conscious individuality and an unconscious, quasi-independent universality that arises out of the many individuals, the life of nature implicitly points beyond itself to a form of existence that unifies its two sides: “Life points to something other than itself, viz. to consciousness, for which Life exists as this unity, or as genus. …”11 Arising out of this polarity of individuality and species life is the higher form of consciousness, human self-consciousness, in which the genus or species becomes something existing for itself. Through the individual human consciousness that it evolves into, the Life Force becomes truly aware of itself. Thus is created a being that transcends the narrow confines of its individual life through its intrinsic connection to the universality and immortality of the Life Force. A higher form of consciousness emerges, human self-consciousness, that is implicitly concerned with its species life as a whole. The fully self-conscious human being therefore experiences a duty to promote humanity as a whole in a conscious way. Human consciousness is intrinsically historical, connecting more or less consciously to the evolution of the human species through many forms and stages of development. Through and in such species consciousness, the individual essentially persists through multiple limited embodiments or lifetimes because the human individual is an expression of Life itself. The self-conscious human being is the immortal Life Force become individualized and aware of itself. Each individual human being is therefore a unique expression of the multiple potentialities of Life itself. Thus as we reflect back on the history of mankind, thanks to dialectical science, we recognize our own personal history in its broadest outlines. We identify with this history, and see our individual ontogeny in one lifetime illuminated by the phylogeny, the history, of humanity itself.
From Spirit to Matter: Involution as the Basis of Evolution
But how is it that unconscious Life is able to give rise to conscious self-awareness? How can the higher forms of consciousness come out of lower forms of unconsciousness? How does something that purposefully moves itself emerge from what does not so move itself? Kant could not explain how the teleological purposefulness of human life could be seen in the natural world, which science supposes is governed by outside causality. Hence he regarded the teleological viewpoint as a projection of human purposes onto nature, even while recognizing that in the sciences of biology a teleological perspective, in which the parts are viewed as working for the good of the larger whole, is a quite natural assumption. However, he thought, if science is essentially about external causal forces, then viewing purposefulness in organic nature must be regarded as unscientific, as a projection of human purposefulness onto nature. Such projection need not be false, for reality as it is in itself is unknowable. But we cannot claim that a teleological view of nature is a matter of science. It arises out of the postulates of morality which require that the Highest Good be seen as realizable, and so as effectively being realized, not only in human history, but in the natural world which is an essential condition of human life.
From Hegel’s perspective of a dialectical science, it is necessary to look at the circle or spiral of cause and effect at the level of the larger totality, where what is effect can be regarded in turn as cause. Human self-consciousness as we have just seen is the effect of the evolution of Life, expressing in a new and higher form the unity of the polar sides of the life process. But this means that the higher form of development of Life, which is human self-consciousness, was somehow already implicit in the lower form of organic life itself. Human consciousness is implicit in the dialectic of organic life as the emerging synthesis of its conflicting tendencies. Similarly, Life too arises out of the polarities of inorganic matter. For matter is not inert, moved only when one inert body collides with another, as the early modern physics of external causality proposes. A better expression of the nature of matter, Hegel thought, is found in the phenomenon of magnetism, with polar forces of attraction and repulsion operating across fields of relationships. Life is capable of arising out of inorganic matter because the self-movement of life is potentially contained within the self-moving dynamics of the polarized, magnetizing, attracting and repelling forces of matter itself. But if life is potentially self-consciousness, and matter is potentially life, then self-consciousness, whose highest form as we will see is Spirit, is already present within the darkest, densest forms of matter, waiting to be awakened out of its sleep in the dynamics of evolution.
On the one hand therefore we are investigating the dialectical processes that give birth to the highest forms of Spirit, emerging within human consciousness. But the effect is in turn also the cause. Evolution presupposes “involution.” Spirit arises out of matter because it is already contained within it, and is the operating dynamic Force of the entire evolutionary process. The ultimate nature of Matter, therefore, is Spirit, but a Spirit that has become the seeming opposite of itself, a light devolving into darkness, in order to evolve from it with a new appreciation of itself. Spirit must descend into matter, become matter, in order to return to Itself. Evolution of consciousness out of matter requires that matter be already proto-conscious or implicit consciousness, already the embodiment of spirit. Evolution presupposes “involution” or “emanation.”12
In this way the Creator does not create out of nothing, but out of Herself, the divine womb or Source of the universe. As we have seen in the previous chapter, in Asian thought the creation proceeds from the Source and returns to the Source. The neo-Platonic philosophers called this doctrine of creation “emanation.” Hegel’s dialectical science of creation interprets the Christian doctrine of the Trinity in just this way: the Son, representing finite creation, proceeds from the Father-Source, becomes lost in the apparent non-divinity of the material world, and then returns to the Source in the unity of the Holy Spirit. God does not impossibly create something out of nothing, for out of nothing can come nothing. The material of creation must be the God-Force itself. The forces of inorganic matter from which the evolutionary process begins must therefore be the God-force in an undeveloped, enveloped, unconscious form. Only by supposing that the higher is already present, implicitly or potentially “involved” in the lower forms of matter, can we explain how the higher forms are able to “evolve” from the lower.