y left behind by the growing soul, and is
therefore ceasing to assert itself, and ceasing to clamour, like a
spoilt child, for this thing and for that,--it will not be long
before the antidote to the poison of egoism will have taken due
effect, and the health of the soul will have been restored.

But let me say again--for I can scarcely say it too often--that the
growth which emancipates from self is many-sided growth, the growth,
not of any one faculty, or group of faculties, but of the soul as
such. Were it not so, the life of self-realisation might easily
become a life of glorified and therefore intensified selfishness. It
is quite possible, as we know from experience, for a high degree of
"culture" to co-exist with a high degree of egoism. It is possible,
for example, for the aesthetic instincts, when not kept aglow by the
sympathetic, or hardened with an alloy of the scientific, to evolve
a peculiar form of selfishness which leads at last to looseness
of life and general demoralisation. And it is possible for the
scientific instincts, when developed at the expense of the aesthetic
and the sympathetic, to evolve a hard, unemotional type of character
which is self-centred and selfish owing to its positiveness and lack
of imagination. But these are instances of inharmonious growth. When
growth is harmonious and many-sided, it leads of necessity to
out-growth, to escape from self. For the expansive instincts are so
many ways of escape from self which Nature opens up to the soul;--the
sympathetic instincts, a way of escape into the boundless aether of
love; the aesthetic instincts, a way of escape into the wonder-world
of beauty; the scientific instincts, a way of escape into the world
of mysteries which is lighted by the "high white star of truth." It
is only when one of the expansive instincts is allowed to aggrandise
itself at the expense of the others, that the consequent outgrowth of
selfishness in what I may call the internal economy of one's nature
begins to reflect itself in a general selfishness of character. An
instinct may readily become egoistic in its effort to affirm or
over-affirm itself, to grasp at its share or more than its share of
the child's rising life: and if it does, it may gradually suck down
into the vortex of its egoism the whole character of the child as he
ripens into the man. But growth, as such, is anti-egoistic just
because it is growth, because it is a movement towards a larger,
fuller,