From the Fourth Way (Ouspensky)

So many opposing principles struggle in man that a harmonious coordination of them is quite impossible. This explains why a " positive " type of man is impossible.

The soul of man is far too complex a combination for all the voices shouting in it to become united into one harmonious choir. All the kingdoms of nature live in man.
Man is a little universe. In him proceed continual death and continual birth, the incessant swallowing of one being by another, the devouring of the weaker by the stronger, evolution and degeneration, growing and dying out. Man has within him everything from a mineral to God.

And the desire of God in man, that is, the directing forces of his spirit, conscious of its unity with the infinite consciousness of the universe, cannot be in harmony with the inertia of a stone, with the inclination of particles for crystallisation, with the sleepy flow of the sap in a plant, with the plant's slow turning towards the sun, with the call of the blood in an animal, with the " three-dimensional " consciousness of man, which is based on his separating himself from the world, on his opposing to the world his own " I " and on his recognising as reality all apparent forms and divisions.