[Footnote B:  Ibid.]

This way upward from the lowest stage through every other to the highest, that is, the way of development, so far from lowering us to the brute level, is the only way for us to attain to the true highest, namely, the all-complete.

  “But grant me time, give me the management
  And manufacture of a model me,
  Me fifty-fold, a prince without a flaw,—­
  Why, there’s no social grade, the sordidest,
  My embryo potentate should brink and scape. 
  King, all the better he was cobbler once,
  He should know, sitting on the throne, how tastes
  Life to who sweeps the doorway."[A]

[Footnote A:  Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau.]

But then, unfortunately, we have no time to make our kings in this way,

“You cut probation short,
And, being half-instructed, on the stage
You shuffle through your part as best you can."[B]

[Footnote B:  Ibid.]

God, however, “takes time.”  He makes man pass his apprenticeship in all the forms of being.  Nor does the poet

          “Refuse to follow farther yet

I’ the backwardness, repine if tree and flower,
Mountain or streamlet were my dwelling-place
Before I gained enlargement, grew mollusc."[C]

[Footnote C:  Ibid.]

It is, indeed, only on the supposition of having been thus evolved from inanimate being that he is able to account

          “For many a thrill

Of kinship, I confess to, with the powers
Called Nature:  animate, inanimate,
In parts or in the whole, there’s something there
Man-like that somehow meets the man in me."[D]

[Footnote D:  Ibid.]

These passages make it clear that the poet recognized that the idea of development “levels up,” and that he makes an intelligent, and not a perverted and abstract use of this instrument of thought.  He sees each higher stage carrying within it the lower, the present storing up the past; he recognizes that the process is a self-enriching one.  He knows it to be no degradation of the higher that it has been in the lower; for he distinguishes between that life, which is continuous amidst the fleeting forms, and the temporary tenements, which it makes use of during the process of ascending.

  “From first to last of lodging, I was I,
  And not at all the place that harboured me."[A]

[Footnote A:  Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau.]

When nature is thus looked upon from the point of view of its final attainment, in the light of the self-consciousness into which it ultimately breaks, a new dignity is added to every preceding phase.  The lowest ceases to be lowest, except in the sense that its promise is not fulfilled and its potency not actualized; for, throughout the whole process, the activity streams from the highest.  It is that which is about to be which guides the growing thing and gives it unity.  The final cause is the efficient cause; the distant purpose is the ever-present energy; the last is always first.