to the world the capacity for being
affected by adverse influences of various kinds, is undeniable; but
so does every other living thing; and if congenital depravity is to
be predicated of him for that reason, it must also be predicated of
every new-born animal and plant.

But the final proof that Man is by nature a child of God, is one
which has already been hinted at, and will presently be further
developed,--namely, that growth--the healthy, vigorous growth of the
whole human being, the harmonious development of his whole nature--is
in its essence a movement towards moral and spiritual perfection. And
the final proof that the doctrine of Man's congenital depravity is
false is the practical one that the doctrine is ever tending to
fulfil its own gloomy predictions, and to justify its own low
estimate of human nature,--in other words, that by making education
repressive and devitalising, by introducing externalism, with its
endless train of attendant evils, into Man's daily life, and by
making him disbelieve in and even despair of himself, it has done
more perhaps than all other influences added together to deprave his
heart and to wreck his life.

To one who has convinced himself that human nature is fundamentally
good, in the sense that the new-born child is as a rule sound and
healthy on all the planes of his being, it must be clear that the
path of soul-growth or self-realisation is the only way of salvation.
What salvation means, what the path of self-realisation will do for
him who enters it, is a theme to which I could not hope to do justice
within the limits of this work. I will therefore content myself
with indicating certain typical aspects of the process which I
have called self-realisation, and saying something about each of
these. Four aspects suggest themselves to me as worthy of special
consideration,--the _mental_, the _moral_, the _social_, and the
_religious_.[26]

_The Mental Aspect of Self-realisation._

There are two features of the process of self-realisation, on the
importance of which I cannot insist too often or too strongly. The
first is that the growth which the life of self-realisation fosters
is, in its essence, harmonious and many-sided. The second is that
the life of self-realisation is, from first to last, a life of
self-expression, and that self-expression and perception are the face
and obverse of the same mental effort.

If the life of self-realisation did not provide for the