ws, know that the goal of the path is
infinitely far away, and in their heart of hearts they laugh both the
current eschatologies to scorn. And the higher they ascend, as they
follow the path, the more vividly do they realise how unimaginably
high above them is the summit of the mountain which the path is
ascending in spiral coils.

The Utopian experiment, humble as it is, can, I think, throw some
light on these mighty problems. The relations between the type and
the various sub-types, between the type and the individual, between
the sub-type and the individual--whether in plant or beast or
man--are matters which could not be handled within the limits of this
book, and which I have therefore as far as possible ignored. Nor have
I attempted to deal with the difficult problems that are presented by
the existence of races, such as the Negro, which seem to be far below
the normal level of human development. There is, however, in the vast
region of thought which these and kindred problems open out to us,
one by-way which I must be allowed to follow for a while.

The wild _bullace_ is, I believe, the ancestor of many of our yellow
_plums_. In other words, bullacehood can develop into plumhood, and
even into the perfection of plumhood. Similarly human nature can
develop into something so high above the normal level of human nature
that it might almost seem to belong to another _genus_. But there is
a difference between the two cases. The bullace ideal is in the
individual bullace tree. So, in a sense, is the plum ideal. But the
latter cannot be realised, or even approached, by the individual
bullace tree. It cannot be realised, or even approached, by the
bullace species except through a long course of culture and breeding.
Is it the same with Man? Let us take English rusticity as a
particular type of human nature,--the equivalent of bullacehood for
the purpose of argument. This is a distinct type, and may be said
to have its own ideal.[37] Emerging from this, and gradually
transforming it, is the ideal of human nature, the ideal for Man as
Man. As the bullace ideal is to the plum ideal, so is the ideal of
English rusticity to the ideal of human nature. But whereas the plum
ideal cannot be realised in any appreciable degree by the individual
bullace, the human ideal can be realised in a quite appreciable
degree by the individual English rustic. There have always been and
will always be isolated cases to prove that this is so,