growth of the
self in its totality, the self as a living whole, it would not be
worthy of its name. One-sided growth, inharmonious growth, growth in
which some faculties are hypertrophied and others atrophied, is not
self-realisation. When trees are planted close together, as in the
beech-forests of the Continent, they climb to great heights in their
struggle for air and light, but they make no lateral growth. When
trees are pollarded, they make abundant lateral growth, but they
cease to climb upward. When trees are exposed to the prevailing winds
of an open sea-coast, they are blown over away from the sea, and make
all their growth, such as it is, on the landward side. When trees
are on the border of a thick plantation, they make all their growth
towards the open air, and are bare and leafless on the opposite side.
In each of these cases the growth made is inharmonious and one-sided:
the balance between the two intersecting planes of growth, or between
the two opposite sides, has been lost. But when a tree is planted in
the open, and when all the other conditions of growth are favourable,
it grows harmoniously in all directions,--upward, outward, and all
around. In other words, it is growing as a whole, growing, as it
ought to grow, through every fibre of its being, and yet maintaining
a perfect symmetry of form and the harmony of true proportion among
its various parts.

This is the kind of growth which the soul makes in the life of
self-realisation; and if it falls appreciably short of this standard,
if it develops itself on this side or that, to the neglect of all
other sides, then we must say of it that, though it is realising this
or that faculty or group of faculties, it is not realising itself. I
have spoken of the six great expansive instincts which indicate the
main lines of the child's natural growth, and I have shown that in
Utopia the cultivation of all those instincts is duly provided for.
In the life of self-realisation the soul would continue to grow on
the lines which those instincts had marked out for it. I do not mean
that when the child goes out into the work-a-day world, he must give
to all six instincts the systematic training which they received, or
ought to have received, in school. The exigencies of the daily round
of life are such as to make that impossible, in all but the most
exceptional cases. But that is all the more reason why the expansive
instincts should be carefully and skilfully tra