Consciousness of disharmony and incompleteness now brings the obligation to mend the disharmony and achieve a fresh synthesis.
This is felt with a special sharpness in the moral life, where the irreconcilable demands of natural self-interest and of Spirit assume their most intractable shape.

Old habits and paths of discharge which have almost become automatic must now, it seems, be abandoned.

New paths, in spite of resistances, must be made.

Thus it is that temptation, hard conflict, and bewildering perplexities usher in the life of the Spirit.

These are largely the results of our biological past continuing into our fluctuating half-made present; and they point towards a psychic stability, an inner unity we have not yet attained.
This realization of ourselves as we truly are--emerging with difficulty from our animal origin, tinctured through and through with the self-regarding tendencies and habits it has imprinted on us--this realization or self-knowledge, is Humility; the only soil in which the spiritual life can germinate.