ervading law of growth.

It is in their desire to keep Man in line with the rest of Nature's
children that so many thinkers and scientists in the West forbid him
to look beyond the horizon of the grave. But in truth it is only by
being allowed to look beyond that horizon that Man can be kept in
line with the rest of Nature's children; for if death means
extinction to him, as it means (or seems to mean) to the beetle or
the fly, he will have lived to no purpose, having failed to realise
in any appreciable degree what every other living thing realises
within its appointed limits,--the central tendencies of his being.
That a living thing, an average specimen of its kind, should within
the limits of a normal life fail completely to realise those
potentialities which are distinctive of its real nature,--fail so
completely that the very existence of those potentialities might, but
for an occasional and quite exceptional revelation, have remained
unsuspected,--is entirely at variance with what we know of the ways
and works of Nature. Yet failure to realise his true manhood is,
outside the confines of Utopia, the apparent lot of nine men out of
ten. An entire range of qualities, spiritual and mental, which
blossom freely in the stimulating atmosphere of Utopia, and which
must therefore exist in embryo in every normal child, fail to
germinate (or at best only just begin to germinate) within the
lifetime of the average non-Utopian.[38] The inference to be drawn
from these significant facts is that the apparent limits of Man's
life are not the real limits; that the one earth-life of which each
of us is conscious, far from being the whole of one's life, is but a
tiny fragment of it,--one term of its ascending "series," one day in
its cycle of years. In other words, the spiritual fertility of the
average Utopian child, taken in conjunction with the spiritual
sterility of the average non-Utopian child (and man), points to the
conclusion which the thinkers of the Far East reached thousands of
years ago,--that for the full development of human nature a plurality
of lives is needed, which will do for the individual soul what
generations of scientific breeding and culture will do for the
bullace that is to be transformed into a plum.

This is one lesson which Utopia has taught me. There is another which
had also been anticipated by the thinkers of the Far East. If under
exceptionally favourable conditions certain spiritual and mental