Matter is an evolution, and out of it hare evolved life, the psychic factor, consciousness.  But consciousness is, then, for the reasons above indicated, a manifest of Infinite and Eternal Reality.

Consciousness is the condition of personality.  When the former first appeared, it was a product.  Thenceforth, because personality was a psychic factor in consciousness, it became a creator.  That is to say, it was capable of enlargement and enrichment, and so, began to unfold its powers, to enrich its own contents by appropriation, and to organize itself in various ways depending upon its nature in each case and the influence of environment.  In seeking to realize itself, as it must do in the nature of things, and in adjusting to environment, which was a second necessity of its being, it began to direct the activities of matter comprising its own body, to select matter from without needful for its kind of body, and to build this material up into a kind of body best adapted to its existence, and thus, by its own character, to determine the character of the organism which it inhabited.

All this work seems entirely independent until we remember that ether, matter, life, the psychic factor, are manifests of Infinite and Eternal Reality.  But when we so remember, we see that personality consisting of a conscious self and a body is similarly a manifest of that Reality.

This conclusion will appear to identify man and Deity unless we discriminate a little.  Every object in Nature is a manifest of Infinite and Eternal Reality, but the latter transcends the former simply because the object is such a manifest, A thing which is a manifest or expression of something superior cannot be identified with the superior something.  I am not the words which I write, although they manifest me and could not exist without me.  Every object in Nature is precisely what it is as a manifest of Reality.  There is scant freedom in the natural world apart from man.  Nothing in Nature could be other than it is.  Man, on the other hand, is a manifest of Infinite and Eternal Reality in the sense that he has a body, and must have one, and is a personality and must be one (if he is man); but in the man psychic factor has come to consciousness, and consciousness, as we have seen, always reveals itself in self-direction and self-organization according to its developed power to think of itself as self-conscious existence.  Were it unable to so think of itself, it could not be self-directive in the fullest sense.  And were it unable to self-direct its own activities, it could not be conscious in the fullest sense of the word.  Our existence manifests Infinite and Eternal Reality, but the power to use that existence is determined by the fact that we are psychic factors in the highest sense exhibited in the earth, and the use we make thereof is determined by our exercise of the power of self-direction and self-organization.  We cannot help being human beings, but what kind of human beings we are, within the limits of personal endowments, depends solely upon ourselves.