428 THE WORLD OF LIFE 



ment and education of an almost equally varied humanity. 

 That variety has been assured and increased by the rapid de- 

 velopment of man — from the epoch when he became a liv- 

 ing soul conscious of good and evil — so far above the beasts 

 which perish that there was little actual selection except to 

 ensure health and vigour, and the gradual advance towards 

 civilisation. All types of character had a fairly equal chance 

 of survival and of leaving offspring, and thus the continued un- 

 checked action of the universal law of variation led to an 

 amount of diversity of human nature far above that of any 

 of the lower animals. We see this diversity manifested through 

 all the ages, from the lowest depths of a Nero, a Borgia, or 

 a De Eetz, to the glorious heights of a Confucius or a Buddha, 

 a Socrates or a Newton. 



But if it had been a law of nature that the effects of educa- 

 tion should be inherited, then men would have been continually 

 moulded to certain patterns; originality would have been bred 

 out by the widespread influences of mediocrity in power, and 

 that ever-present variety in art, in science, in intellect, in 

 ethics, and in the higher and purer aspirations of humanity, 

 would have been certainly diminished. And if it be said that 

 the very bad would have been made better if educational in- 

 fluences had been inherited, even this may be doubted; for 

 in times which permitted so much that was bad, education 

 often tended to increase rather than diminish the evil. On 

 the other hand, w^e are more and more coming to see that none 

 were all bad, and that their worst excesses were due in large 

 part to the influence of their environment and the fierce temp- 

 tations to which they were, and still are, so unnecessarily ex- 

 posed. 



But it is when we look upon man as being here for the 

 very purpose of developing diversity and individuality, to be 

 further advanced in a future life, that we see more clearly the 

 whole object of our earth-life as a preparation for it. In this 

 world we have the maximum of diversity produced, with a 

 potential capacity for individual educability, and inasmuch as 



