ce which ever seeks one
variation and then another. Then, when one variation appears, more
appropriate to its surroundings than others, this, because of its
fitness, survives. As human beings we are individualised fragments of
the great universal spirit. There is only the one life and the one
spirit, but there are diversities of gifts to enable that spirit to be
expressed. The grass expresses it in its luxuriance, its colour, and
its growth: the birds in their song: and the whole of what we are
pleased to term the lower creation bespeaks this spirit in the daily
activity. When this expression ceases, the thing that was once alive is
dead.

There is no special merit that all the works of the Lord should thus
praise the Lord in their expression, because below the stage of a human
being there is no option. The lower forms of life are like lamps on a
circuit which light up by reason of the current over which they
exercised no control. But a human being is like a lamp that is connected
with the main circuit and yet has its own switch. This ability to switch
on or off constitutes our measure of freewill, our power of saying yes
or no. It is a necessary accompaniment of our knowledge of good and evil
for "no choice, no progress." It betokens our progress from the merely
animal stage of consciousness to that of self-consciousness--the phase
of existence where we not only know, but we know that we know. This
ability to express well, badly, or not at all, just as we may please, is
our special prerogative: it gives man the privilege, which is denied to
all life below him, of deliberately choosing the worse and of making a
fool of himself. The animals know what is good for them because they
follow their unreasoning instincts and blindly repeat the racial course
of action implanted within them, and the mere survival of the species
proves that this particular response to the particular circumstance has
been "tried out" by ages of experience. But a man blinds and smothers
his instincts (and these at the best, it may be observed, are distinctly
mixed) or perhaps indulges them in defiance of his better judgment, and
thus his expression of his own divinity is often sadly marred.[5]

[Note 5: James Rhoades.]

"Know this, O man, sole root of sin in thee
Is not to know thine own divinity."

A man may even deny the very existence of spirit, and thus by a subtle
but efficacious species of self-suggestion prevent its manifestation i