range transcendent
thing; we seek to promote life by methods as unnatural as they prove
unsuccessful; and only the utter incomprehensibility of the whole region
prevents us seeing fully--what we already half-suspect--how completely
we are missing the road. Living in the spiritual world, nevertheless, is
just as simple as living in the natural world; and it is the same kind
of simplicity. It is the same kind of simplicity for it is the same kind
of world--there are not two kinds of worlds. The conditions of life in
the one are the conditions of life in the other. And till these
conditions are sensibly grasped, as the conditions of all life, it is
impossible that the personal effort after the highest life should be
other than a blind struggle carried on in fruitless sorrow and
humiliation.

Of these two universal factors, Heredity and Environment, it is
unnecessary to balance the relative importance here. The main influence,
unquestionably, must be assigned to the former. In practice, however,
and for an obvious reason, we are chiefly concerned with the latter.
What Heredity has to do for us is determined outside ourselves. No man
can select his own parents. But every man to some extent can choose his
own Environment. His relation to it, however largely determined by
Heredity in the first instance, is always open to alteration. And so
great is his control over Environment and so radical its influence over
him, that he can so direct it as either to undo, modify, perpetuate or
intensify the earlier hereditary influence within certain limits. But
the aspects of Environment which we have now to consider do not involve
us in questions of such complexity. In what high and mystical sense,
also, Heredity applies to the spiritual organism we need not just now
inquire. In the simpler relations of the more external factor we shall
find a large and fruitful field for study.

The influence of Environment may be investigated in two main aspects.
First, one might discuss the modern and very interesting question as to
the power of Environment to induce what is known to recent science as
Variation. A change in the surroundings of any animal, it is now
well-known, can so react upon it as to cause it to change. By the
attempt, conscious or unconscious, to adjust itself to the new
conditions, a true physiological change is gradually wrought within the
organism. Hunter, for example, in a classical experiment, so changed the
Environment of a