286 HOLISM AND EVOLUTION chap. 



holistic evolution will have to be carefully selected, if effort 

 is not to be largely wasted. There are many types of per- 

 sonality which would not be specially suitable for studying 

 personal evolution. There is, for instance, the type which 

 does not seem to possess an inner evolution. Many dis- 

 tinguished persons appear to be full grown in early manhood 

 and thereafter to undergo no further growth. Their develop- 

 ment reaches maturity early in life, and thereafter appears 

 to be arrested. I may mention Carlyle as an instance; his 

 first great work, Sartor Resartus, was a complete and final 

 exposition of his inner self, and no further development of 

 his inner life seems to have taken place thereafter. This 

 phenomenon of early maturity and arrest of further develop- 

 ment is by no means unusual. We meet it in the case of 

 many persons in our circle of acquaintances who somehow 

 don't seem to grow, but to stand still after arriving at a 

 certain comparatively early age. We meet it again in the 

 tragic case of those authors who write a famous book early 

 in life and thereafter can do no more than repeat themselves 

 with less and less freshness and ever-waning originality. All 

 these instances simply point to arrested development, to the 

 absence of a capacity for inner growth. As Personality is 

 best studied in its genetic development, as its plastic inward- 

 ness is best seen in the successive phases it assumes in a 

 continuously growing, expanding human being, it follows 

 that the exceptional stationary or early maturing person- 

 alities afford less favourable material for the study of human 

 Personality as a whole. 



There is another class of persons unsuitable for our pur- 

 pose, consisting of those who do not seem to have much of 

 an inner self at all, whose activities and interests are all of 

 I an external character, who live not the inner life of the 

 spirit but the external life of affairs. We often notice this 

 feature in the lives and characters of public men, men of 

 affairs, administrators, business men and others, whose 

 whole mind seems to be absorbed by the practical interest 

 of their work. In them the capacity for the inner life seems 

 to have shrivelled and atrophied under the pressure of 



