MIND AND SOUL 221 



result therefrom. But God alone can judge in a case like this. 

 For I must ask my reader to remember that in our animal and 

 past existences the acts that made the highest perfection and 

 virtue were the very ones we now consider the greatest vices. 



Thus animal murder and cannibalism were the virtues 

 that developed the perfection of self-will in man which 

 raised him above the animals and fitted him to evolve a soul by 

 evolving his superior bodily strength, activity and energy 

 without which strength he would have been unable to evolve 

 thought and to support his mind. So also in the last three 

 hundred thousand years selfishness and cruelty have been the 

 highest virtues without which man could not have conquered 

 nations and built up empires. Then had not superstition be- 

 come the first virtue of its day, man would never have been 

 sufficiently obedient for it to be possible to control, rule and 

 govern him by elementary religions, whose strength lay in 

 their trading on his superstitious credulity, and early forms 

 of government until his mind had evolved a sufficient power of 

 imagination to conceive the existence of God, and the elemen- 

 tary knowledge of the revelations of the truth of nature 

 enabled him to control them by ignorance. This was what 

 enabled mankind to move a step further on the road of evolu- 

 tion to religion and virtue by learning to believe what he could 

 neither see nor understand, after which bigotry became the 

 highest virtue without which it would have been impossible 

 to evolve fanaticism ; and it is only through fanaticism that the 

 virtuous minorities throughout the course of history have been 

 able to conquer the degenerate majorities, and this has in the 

 past, and for a short time longer must still be the process by 

 which the survival and triumph of virtue over scientific vice 

 has been made possible. Next selfishness becomes the highest 

 virtue and is the virtue of the present age, the age of the 

 triumph of science and commerce, and its extension throughout 

 the world, for but for the greed of wealth and the love of fame 

 and display, the development of civilisation would have long 

 since been lost in drunken orgies, family hates and feuds, lazy 

 affluence and cruel oppression. 



And we find that the day is not yet past when prowess in 

 war, deeds of grasping by the powers of might rather than by 

 the right of justice, the possession of wealth by arts of fraud 

 and cunning rather than by skill and wisdom are considered as 



