THE PROBLEM 
 OF THE SOUL 
 
 EDMOND HOLMES 
 
Portions of a paper on " The Real Basis of Democracy " 
 which appeared in the August (1917) number of the 
 Nineteenth Century and After are included in this book 
 by the kind permission of the Editor. 
 
THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUL 
 
2?y the same Author 
 
 WHAT IS AND WHAT MIGHT BE 
 IN DEFENCE OF WHAT MIGHT BE 
 THE TRAGEDY OF EDUCATION 
 THE NEMESIS OF DOCILITY 
 THE CREED OF CHRIST 
 THE CREED OF BUDDHA 
 THE SILENCE OF LOVE 
 THE CREED OF MY HEART 
 ETC. 
 
THE PROBLEM OF 
 THE SOUL 
 
 A TRACT FOR TEACHERS 
 
 Being an Attempt to determine what Limits, if any, 
 there are to the Transforming Influence of Education 
 
 BY 
 
 EDMOND HOLMES 
 
 LONDON 
 
 CONSTABLE AND COMPANY LTD 
 
First published 
 1917 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE LAW OF GROWTH . 11 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT : A. THE 
 PHYSICAL PLANE . 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT continued : 
 B. THE HIGHER PLANES . . .31 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 THE THEORY OF STRAIN . . .63 
 
 9 
 
10 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE ANCESTRY OF THE SOUL . 83 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 THE RANGE or THE SOUL 106 
 
THE 
 
 PROBLEM OF THE SOUL 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE LAW OF GROWTH 
 
 FOR all who educate and for all who are interested 
 in education there is one question which is of 
 paramount importance : What can education 
 do for him who is to be educated ? What changes 
 can it work in him ? What ends can it set before 
 itself, and him ? To this question there is an 
 obvious answer. Education can do one thing, 
 if no other one thing which includes all other 
 things ; it can further or hinder growth. So 
 I, for one, instinctively assume. So I have 
 always instinctively assumed ever since I began 
 to think seriously about education. This as- 
 sumption has another behind it namely, that 
 human nature comes under the law of growth. 
 What warrant is there for these assumptions ? 
 Let us begin with the latter. Does human nature, 
 not on its physical side only, but in all its length 
 11 
 
12 THE PKOBLEM OF THE SOUL 
 
 and breadth and depth, come under the great 
 law which dominates the worlds of plant and 
 animal life ? I have always assumed, and I 
 must continue to assume, that it does. I cannot 
 by any effort of thought think otherwise. The 
 question is, I believe, debated ; but I cannot take 
 part in the debate. So far as I am concerned, 
 the question does not exist. Wherever there is 
 life there is growth (or the opposite of growth 
 decay) ; and I find it impossible I can use no 
 weaker word to separate in my thought the 
 idea of life from that of growth. In the years 
 of childhood and adolescence we see the gradual 
 unfolding, not of physical powers and tendencies 
 only, but also of those which are mental, moral, 
 aesthetic, spiritual. If this process of unfolding 
 is not to be called growth, I do not know what 
 is the right name for it ; nor do I know what 
 growth means. 
 
 But, because I assume that human life in its 
 totality comes under the law of growth, I am 
 not therefore bound to assume that it comes under 
 the law or laws of physical growth. When Pro- 
 fessor Bateson says that " Shakespeare once 
 existed as a speck of protoplasm not so big as a 
 pin's head," he begs, as we shall presently see, 
 a very large question. If we are to predicate 
 growth of the whole human being, we must use 
 the word in its widest and most comprehensive 
 sense, we must have in mind only what is really 
 
THE LAW OF GROWTH 13 
 
 essential in the process of growth. Now what 
 is essential in the process of growth is the realiza- 
 tion of potentiality, the transformation of a 
 complex of possibilities into a fully developed 
 organism, of what can be into what is. Such a 
 transformation would not be possible if the 
 organism, the ultimate product of growth, how- 
 ever large and complex it might be, were not 
 present, in promise and potency, in the seed from 
 which it grows. Each seed is fraught with its 
 own destiny. It will grow, if it is allowed to 
 grow, to what is in large measure a predeter- 
 mined form. I mean by this that its expansive 
 activities will move in a particular channel and 
 arrive, in the fulness of time if all goes well 
 at a particular goal. The channel may not be 
 accurately mapped out. The goal may be a 
 matter for conjecture rather than for positive 
 knowledge. But that the expanding life has a 
 channel and a goal of its own is certain. The 
 oak-tree is in the acorn, not in the beechnut ; the 
 banyan-tree, 
 
 " With all its thousand downward-dropping sterna 
 Waiting to fall from all its thousand boughs, 
 And all its lakhs and lakhs of lustrous leaves 
 Waiting to push to sunlight," 
 
 is in the minute seed of the banyan fruit, which, 
 though scarcely distinguishable from the seed 
 of the ordinary fig, is fraught with an entirely 
 different destiny. If, then, human nature in its 
 
14 THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUL 
 
 totality comes under the law of growth, the 
 question at once arises : What are the possibilities 
 of human development ? What is it that is to 
 the human embryo what the oak-tree is to the 
 acorn or the banyan-tree to the seed of the 
 banyan fruit ? 
 
 Before we attempt to answer this question we 
 shall do well to ask ourselves what is to be our 
 starting-point in this enterprise. In other words, 
 how far back are we to go in quest of the human 
 embryo ? By human embryo I mean the em- 
 bryo of the whole human being, not of the human 
 body only. The acorn may be regarded as the 
 embryo of the oak-tree. But the acorn was once 
 a mere speck on an oak twig, and had to go 
 through a long process of growth before it was 
 able to detach itself from the parent tree and 
 start on an independent course of growth. This 
 analogy, though we must not overwork it, is at 
 least suggestive. It is as a new-born baby that 
 the embryo of the human being starts on an 
 independent course of growth. Let us, then, 
 make the new-born baby our starting-point. 
 If we go further back, if we go back to Professor 
 Bateson's " speck of protoplasm," we shall make 
 the grave mistake of resolving psychology into 
 biology just when we are attempting the solution 
 of the greatest of all psychological problems. 
 
 Let us now return to my initial assumption. 
 If human nature in its totality comes under the 
 
THE LAW OF GROWTH 15 
 
 law of growth, it is not an assumption but a 
 legitimate conclusion that the function of educa- 
 tion is to foster growth. But what does this 
 mean ? What specific duties are we to assign 
 to the educator ? What is the scope of her 
 work ? (I use the feminine pronoun because nine 
 educators out of ten are women.) What is its 
 ideal goal ? The work of the educator begins 
 in the nursery, and is carried on through the 
 years of childhood and adolescence into the 
 adult life of the pupil. To foster physical growth 
 is part of her duty. Here she comes into line 
 with the planter, the farmer, and the gardener, 
 from whom she has much to learn. The trainer 
 of plant and animal life gives his charges as 
 favourable an environment as possible, and 
 leaves the rest to their own activities. But 
 their activities, owing to the operation of the 
 law of heredity, are strictly predetermined, and 
 the task of providing a favourable environment 
 is therefore comparatively simple. The plant 
 and the animal are in the grip of physical neces- 
 sity. Their destiny has been marked out for 
 them by their breeding. They may fall far 
 short of it. But they cannot transcend it. 
 
 It is the same, though possibly not to the 
 same extent, with the body of man. But what 
 of the higher planes of his being ? There he feels 
 and the feeling grows stronger as the dawning 
 light of consciousness grows fuller and clearer 
 
16 THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUL 
 
 that it is open to him to help or hinder the process 
 of his own growth. We cannot get behind this 
 feeling of freedom. A profound philosophy of 
 life is implicit in it. May we trust it ? If we 
 may and we may because we must the scope 
 of education will expand indefinitely and the 
 opportunities and responsibilities of the educator 
 will know no limits. For if the growth of the 
 child on the higher planes of his being is not 
 predetermined (in the narrower sense of that 
 word), if it is not limited, as is his bodily growth, 
 by the stress of physical heredity, then the 
 problem of giving him a favourable environment 
 becomes, owing to our ignorance of his possi- 
 bilities, infinitely complex and far-reaching ; 
 and though the educator must do what the grower 
 and breeder always do, and she too seldom does 
 allow her pupil to do the business of growfrig 
 for himself she must also do far more than that ; 
 she must help him to ally himself, as it were, with 
 his own expansive tendencies, to throw his will- 
 power into the work of furthering, not hindering, 
 the process of his growth. Above all, she must 
 help him to discover his latent resources, to 
 develop his latent potentialities, to realize his 
 unknown and mysterious self. 
 
 The hypothesis of human freedom commits her 
 to this great adventure. But we must not, 
 thus early, take so much on her behalf for granted. 
 So, instead of assuming at the outset that ideally 
 
THE LAW OP GROWTH 17 
 
 there are no limits to the transforming influence 
 of education, let us ask what limits, if any, there 
 are. This, I repeat, is the question of questions 
 for all who educate and for all who are interested 
 in education. To ask the question is equivalent 
 to asking whether man, though subject to the 
 law of growth, is exempt from the necessity which 
 seems to bind all other living things of growing 
 to a predetermined form ; and if so, in what sense 
 he is exempt, and to what extent. 
 
 2 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 
 
 A. THE PHYSICAL PLANE l 
 
 I HAVE now raised the vexed question of heredity 
 and environment, and I must try to think it out. 
 Growth is, in its essence, the realization of 
 potentiality. As far as our experience goes, 
 potentiality is always the product of generation, 
 not of creation an inheritance, not a gift ; and 
 the realization of potentiality is always effected 
 through reaction to environment. It follows 
 that there are two chief factors in growth 
 heredity, which gives us realizable potentiality, 
 
 1 When I speak of the physical plane I am thinking of the 
 physical side of physique and of that only. I do not forget 
 that physique and spirituality (to use a comprehensive term), 
 however much we may try to separate them in thought, will 
 insist on overlapping and even interpenetrating one another 
 that expression, for example, is a quasi- spiritual feature or 
 aspect of the outer man, just as temperament, for example, is 
 a quasi-physical feature or aspect of the inner man. But, 
 having found it convenient, for the better ordering of my 
 thoughts, to separate the physical from the higher planes, I 
 must as far as possible exclude from the former whatever is 
 not purely physical. 
 
 18 
 
HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 19 
 
 and environment, which makes the realization 
 of potentiality possible. Why, then, is heredity 
 so often opposed to environment ? Why is 
 there a controversy as to the parts which environ- 
 ment and heredity, " nature " and "nurture," 
 respectively play in human life ? Why does 
 Professor Bateson tell us that " the long-standing 
 controversy as to the relative importance of 
 nature and nurture ... is drawing to an end, 
 and of the overwhelming greater significance of 
 nature there is no longer any possibility of 
 doubt " ? Why does Dr. Chalmers Mitchell say, 
 on the contrary, that " with regard to mental, 
 moral, and emotional qualities, which are of 
 preponderating importance in man . . . nurture 
 is incomparably more important than nature " ? 
 How has this question arisen, and what is its 
 real significance ? It has been said and with 
 some show of reason that heredity and environ- 
 ment are the warp and woof of the tissue of life. 
 But if these are the parts that they respectively 
 play, there is no controversy between them. 
 And perhaps if we could state correctly the 
 question which, unknown to ourselves, we are 
 trying to answer, we should find that our opposi- 
 tion of heredity to environment, of " nature " 
 to " nurture," was based on a misconception, 
 and that the question, as it was usually stated, 
 was unreal. Meanwhile, however, we must face 
 the fact that many practical problems perplex 
 
20 THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUL 
 
 us which raise, or seem to raise, the question to 
 which Professor Bateson and Dr. Chalmers Mit- 
 chell have given diametrically opposite answers. 
 For example : the child of criminal parents, 
 reared in a criminal slum, becomes a criminal. 
 Is his criminality " in his blood," or is it the 
 result of his unfortunate environment ? Or, if 
 both causes have been at work, which has been 
 the predominant influence ? Is the servility 
 of the German people in the blood of the German 
 race (if there is such a thing), or is it due to a 
 tradition which has had an historical origin and 
 which now permeates the environing atmosphere 
 into which every German is born ? Is the appar- 
 ent inferiority of the " lower orders " to the 
 " upper middle classes " (let us say) in intellect, 
 manners, and general culture vital or accidental ? 
 Is it due to an inferior strain of blood or to a 
 less favourable environment ? These are legiti- 
 mate questions, and their practical significance 
 is obvious. 
 
 But do they really commit us to a considera- 
 tion of the parts which heredity and environment 
 respectively play in human life ? I think not. 
 I think that the question which is actually at 
 issue has been obscured by a fog of confused 
 thought, and that the ultimate source of that 
 confusion has been our failure to distinguish 
 between racial and lineal heredity, between the 
 common and the differential elements in our 
 
HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 21 
 
 inheritance. By the common elements I mean 
 those which we inherit from the whole human 
 race and which we therefore share with all our 
 fellow-men. By the differential elements I mean 
 those which we inherit from our own more recent 
 line of ancestors and which are therefore in some 
 special sense our own. The distinction between 
 what we inherit from the whole human race (or 
 perhaps from some remoter source of being) and 
 what we inherit from our own lineal ancestors 
 is a real one ; and it is a pity that it is so often 
 ignored. Examples drawn from the physical 
 side of human life will help me to make my mean- 
 ing clear. Though no two men are exactly 
 alike, yet all men have the same bodily structure, 
 and each man inherits what is essential in his 
 bodily structure from the whole human race. 
 Thus every normal infant has so many bones 
 arranged in such and such ways, such and such 
 organs arranged in such and such ways, such 
 and such limbs, such and such facial features 
 and senses, an elaborate system of veins, nerves, 
 and muscles, a series of skins, the beginnings of 
 hair, nails, and teeth. These constitute the 
 infant's racial inheritance. But infant differs 
 from infant in respect of the size, form, colour, 
 and proportions, both of its frame as a whole 
 and of each of its constituent parts ; and these 
 differential elements constitute its lineal inherit- 
 ance, for it owes them not wholly perhaps, but 
 
22 THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUL 
 
 in large measure to its more recent line of 
 ancestors, to what we call, loosely and inaccu- 
 rately, its " strain of blood." 
 
 Or put the matter thus. Racial heredity gives 
 a man a human nose. Lineal heredity helps 
 to determine the contour of his nose. Racial 
 heredity gives a man a pair of human eyes. 
 Lineal heredity helps to determine the colour and 
 setting of his eyes. Racial heredity gives a man 
 a human mouth. Lineal heredity helps to deter- 
 mine the size and shape of the mouth. And so on. 
 
 Now it is certain that when we oppose heredity 
 to environment, we are thinkftig of lineal, not 
 of racial heredity ; of the differential, not of 
 the common elements in human nature. We 
 take the common elements for granted. When 
 we speak of the physique which the child inherits, 
 we take for granted that he has so many bones, 
 such and such organs, such and such a system 
 of veins, nerves, muscles, and the rest. The 
 child has these because he is a human being, not 
 because he is the child of certain parents or the 
 descendant of certain ancestors. We do not 
 give a thought to the common elements in his 
 bodily structure. What we are thinking of when 
 we speak of his physical resemblance to his parents 
 or his ancestors are the differential elements 
 the build of his skull, the contour of his nose, 
 the colour and setting of his eyes, the size and 
 shape of his mouth, the tint and texture of his 
 
HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 23 
 
 hair, his height, weight, colouring, form, propor- 
 tions, bodily vigour, and so forth. 
 
 It is also certain that when we oppose heredity 
 to environment, we are thinking of environment 
 as coming in some sort and some measure under 
 human control. 
 
 These reservations are all-important. To op- 
 pose heredity as such to environment as such, to 
 ask which of the two influences plays the larger 
 part in the process of growth, would be nonsense. 
 As well might we ask (to revert to our borrowed 
 simile) which counts for more in the weaving of 
 a tissue, the warp or the woof. But when the 
 reservations which I have indicated have been 
 made, we begin to see a meaning in our much- 
 debated problem. Does lineal heredity count 
 for so much in human life as to commit us to a 
 fatalistic, and therefore pessimistic, " theory of 
 things " ? If not, how are we to counteract its 
 influence, when it happens to be harmful or unduly 
 restrictive ? By giving a favourable environ- 
 ment to its victim, is an obvious answer to this 
 question. But environment can do no more 
 than enable inherited potentiality to realize 
 itself. How, then, can it remove, or even lessen, 
 the disabilities which are inherent in one's 
 " blood " ? In one way and one way only. 
 By allying itself with racial heredity ; in other 
 words, by allowing the potentialities of our racial 
 inheritance to realize themselves and play their 
 
24 THE PEOBLEM OF THE SOUL 
 
 several parts. The more the racial element in 
 one's inheritance outweighs the lineal, the more 
 the potentialities of one's racial inheritance out- 
 weigh the actualities, the greater will be the scope 
 for the transforming influence of environment, 
 and the less will heredity (in the conventional 
 sense of the word) count in one's life. 
 
 This much we can see at the outset. Let us 
 now consider a concrete case. A, the child of 
 criminal parents, born and reared in a criminal 
 slum, grows up a criminal. Does not this illus- 
 trate the force of " heredity " ? Let us assume 
 that it does. But B, another child of the same 
 parents, born in the same slum, having been 
 taken away from it early in life and brought up 
 in respectable surroundings, grows up a respect- 
 able member of society. What has happened ? 
 Has " environment " triumphed over " heredity " ? 
 No, but racial heredity, having been given fair 
 play, has proved stronger than lineal heredity. 
 It is probable that B would not have been re- 
 generated had he not been given a favourable 
 environment. But it is certain that he would 
 not have been regenerated had he not, as a human 
 being, had in him certain social and ethical 
 potentialities which were waiting to be realized. 
 What environment did in his case, what it does 
 in all similar cases, is to enable racial heredity, 
 the nature of man as man, to bring its appropriate 
 reserves of potentiality into action. 
 
HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 25 
 
 The question, then, which we have to consider 
 is not what parts do environment and heredity 
 respectively play in human life, but what parts 
 do racial and lineal heredity respectively play 
 in that great drama. Let us first consider this 
 question in relation to the physical plane of life. 
 Our starting-point is the body of the new-born 
 baby. It is not until the baby is born that its 
 environment comes in any appreciable degree 
 under human control. During its pre-natal life 
 its environment is under the control of " Nature " ; 
 and though the mother can do much to thwart 
 the action of Nature, she can do nothing to aid 
 it except in the sense of giving it fair play. 
 
 Now in the baby's physical inheritance the 
 preponderant element is undoubtedly the racial. 
 The possession of a nose is of much more import- 
 ance than the shape of the nose. The possession 
 of eyes than the colour of the eyes. The posses- 
 sion of a mouth than the size of the mouth. And 
 so on. The pressure of lineal heredity on the 
 individual is the pressure of a few centuries 
 at most perhaps, as in the case of the pure-bred 
 Jew, of twenty or thirty. The pressure of racial 
 heredity is the pressure of myriads of centuries 
 of all the ages, one might almost say, since life 
 began. The pressure of lineal heredity is the 
 pressure of a few scores of ancestors. The 
 pressure of racial heredity is the pressure of 
 unnumbered millions of men. 
 
26 THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUL 
 
 Yet it is on the physical plane that the directive, 
 and therefore restrictive, influence of heredity 
 is greatest, and the transforming influence of 
 environment least. The explanation of this is 
 simple. On the physical plane there are no 
 great reserves of potentiality for environment to 
 draw upon. Or, if there are, its power of drawing 
 upon them is strictly limited. As far as it goes, 
 the body of the new-*born child is an actuality, 
 an accomplished fact. Years of growth await 
 it. But the process of growing will be carried 
 on within narrow Iftnits and, in the main, along 
 predetermined lines. Environment can do much 
 for the child. In a sense it can do everything. 
 But it cannot work miracles. It cannot give 
 him a third eye, or a sixth finger, or a thirty- 
 third tooth. Nor can it add appreciably to his 
 predestined strength or stature. If a child has 
 it in him to grow, under perfectly favourable 
 conditions, to the height of six feet, a bad environ- 
 ment may make him fall short of that limit, but 
 no environment, however good, will enable him 
 to transcend it. The influence of environment in 
 what I may call the downward direction is limited 
 only by death. In the upward direction it is 
 limited by the physical constitution of man. 
 From the point of view of physical development, 
 the average environment of mankind, especially 
 in what are called civilized countries, is very far 
 from ideal. And because there is room in it for 
 
HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 27 
 
 endless improvement, we are apt to overestimate 
 the transforming influence of environment on 
 physique. It is but right that we should labour 
 incessantly to improve the material conditions 
 under which men live. But even if we could 
 give the growing child an ideal environment we 
 should do no more than enable him to fulfil his 
 physical destiny. And that destiny is strictly 
 limited. Or if there is an element of ideality, and 
 therefore of infinity, in it, if even such physical 
 perfection as man, whether collective or individual, 
 has it in him to attain, is in a sense unattainable, 
 the goal is near and cannot be transcended. 
 Favourable physical conditions, if continued for 
 some generations, might raise the average height 
 of a nation by two or three inches ; but even if 
 they were continued for 10,000 years they would 
 not raise the average height of the nation to 
 six and a half feet. The movement towards 
 physical perfection is perhaps an infinite "series " ; 
 but if so, its infinity, like that of an arithmetical 
 series which advances by ever-diminishing frac- 
 tions, has finite limits. 
 
 The reason, then, why lineal heredity counts 
 for so much on the physical plane is that racial 
 heredity has fixed the typical form to which the 
 individual is predestined to grow, and that the 
 transforming influence of environment in what 
 I have called the upward direction is therefore 
 comparatively small. 
 
28 THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUL 
 
 It is true that A, whose physical inheritance 
 is inferior to B's, may, under the influence of a 
 better environment, become the stronger and 
 healthier man. But the explanation of this is, 
 not that A has been transformed beyond 
 recognition by his favourable surroundings, but 
 that B, living under unfavourable conditions, 
 has seriously deteriorated. It is because man as 
 man cannot alter his physical frame or constitu- 
 tion, that the individual man cannot materially 
 alter (except for the worse) the face or figure or 
 constitution which he inherits from his fore- 
 fathers. It is because man as man cannot alter 
 the arrangement and general modelling of his 
 facial features, that the individual man cannot 
 materially alter (except for the worse) the build 
 of his nose, or the colour of his eyes, or the shape 
 of his mouth. It is because man as man cannot 
 transcend the limits which racial heredity imposes 
 on him, that the individual cannot appreciably 
 transcend the limits which lineal heredity imposes 
 on him. If " environment " is to triumph over 
 " heredity " in other words, if the influence of 
 environment on the individual life is to outweigh 
 that of lineal heredity, to the extent (for example) 
 of removing or seriously lessening " inherited " 
 disabilities it must, as I have said, have large 
 reserves of racial or common potentiality to 
 draw upon. On the physical plane it has not 
 such reserves, for the physical potentialities of 
 
HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 29 
 
 the human animal have to a large extent been 
 realized in the course of his evolution, and the 
 margin in reserve is small. 
 
 In what relation, then, do lineal and racial 
 heredity stand to one another on the physical 
 plane ? The latter is incomparably the larger 
 and more important element ; but from the point 
 of view of the controversy between " environ- 
 ment " and " heredity " its preponderance scarcely 
 counts. Under the influence of a good environ- 
 ment a child will make good growth. Under the 
 influence of a bad environment he will make 
 poor growth. But in either case he will grow 
 towards a more or less precisely predetermined 
 form. Predetermined, in the main and in the 
 mass and also in systematized detail, by racial 
 heredity ; but in outline and in individuality 
 of detail, by lineal heredity. And as it is the 
 outline which first catches the eye, as we are 
 naturally interested in what is differential in a 
 man's face and figure, as we instinctively take 
 a man's racial inheritance the " constant and 
 common " element in his physique for granted, 
 we say and (in spite of the great preponderance 
 of the racial element) we are on the whole justified 
 in saying that lineal heredity counts for much 
 in the bodily life of man. And if we are asked 
 what part it plays in his physical development, 
 we answer that it transmits to him his racial 
 inheritance and modifies it, puts the stamp of 
 
30 THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUL 
 
 individuality on it, in the course of transmission ; 
 in other words, that it determines the particular 
 lines along which, in response to the influence 
 of environment be that environment good or 
 bad the individual child will realize his racial 
 inheritance and develop into an adult man. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT Continued 
 
 B. THE HIGHER PLANES 
 
 WHEN we leave the physical plane behind us we 
 pass into another world a world of mysteries 
 and infinities, a world of fathomless depths, of 
 dark spaces, of unknown possibilities, a world of 
 
 " Far-folded mists and gleaming halls of morn." 
 
 The body of the new-born child is a concrete 
 actuality. Its destiny even its ideal destiny 
 is virtually fixed, partly by racial, partly by 
 lineal heredity. The child may easily miss that 
 destiny. The chances are that he will not fully 
 realize it. It is certain that he will not transcend 
 it. His " soul," on the other hand, is a complex 
 of potentialities mental, emotional, aesthetic, 
 moral, spiritual an undefinable, illimitable, in- 
 extricable tangle of latent tendencies, capacities, 
 instincts, passions, desires. Some of these will 
 soon press for realization. Others will wait their 
 time in the background. Others, in the absence 
 of a favourable environment, will remain shadowy 
 
 31 
 
32 THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUL 
 
 possibilities to the end of the child's life. Others 
 would remain for ever unknown and unguessed 
 at, unless, like a flash of lightning at midnight, 
 some supreme crisis should suddenly reveal their 
 presence. Beyond these there is impenetrable 
 darkness ; but a wall of darkness is not neces- 
 sarily a wall of limitation. 
 
 In this vast complex of potentialities how much 
 does the child owe to racial, how much to lineal 
 heredity ? How much is his because he is a 
 human being, how much because he is of such 
 and such a " seed " ? We cannot say. The 
 question, as I have stated it, has not, I think, been 
 fully considered ; but by implication it has often 
 been asked and answered, though no answer 
 has yet been given which can be accepted as 
 authoritative. For this is the point in which 
 the controversy between heredity and environ- 
 ment really centres ; and in that controversy 
 even the experts take diametrically opposite 
 sides, the Mendelians, for example, assuring us 
 that " of the overwhelmingly greater Significance 
 of nature (heredity) there is no longer any possi- 
 bility of doubt," while the Epigenesists (if that 
 is their correct title) are equally confident that 
 " nurture (environment) is inconceivably more 
 important than nature." 
 
 When doctors disagree, when they flatly con- 
 tradict one another, what can an amateur do 
 but try to think the matter out for himself ? 
 
HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 33 
 
 This particular matter is, I need hardly say, by 
 no means easy for anyone, whether expert or 
 amateur, to think out. Indeed, it is the very 
 magnitude of the task that confronts him which 
 justifies the amateur in venturing to grapple 
 with it. In the presence of what is infinite and 
 ultimate the difference between expert and 
 amateur becomes wholly negligible. The expert 
 is one who has specialized in a particular field of 
 inquiry. But who can specialize in the funda- 
 mental problems of life ? 
 
 When we try to determine the limits (if any) 
 of our racial inheritance, we are faced at the 
 outset by one almost insuperable difficulty. To 
 say with any approach to accuracy what poten- 
 tialities other than physical are latent in a new- 
 born baby, is for obvious reasons impossible. 
 That the baby will in due season think, reason, 
 plan, purpose, love, sympathize, imagine, and 
 so forth may safely be predicted. But the 
 range, the reach, the latent possibilities of these 
 great tendencies in this case and in that, and 
 even in the average human being are wholly 
 unknown to us. Until potentiality has begun 
 to realize itself we know as little about it as 
 about the resources of an undiscovered land. As 
 the baby becomes successively a child, an adoles- 
 cent, and an adult man, his potentialities gradu- 
 ally realize themselves, and it becomes possible 
 for us to study them. But, unhappily, while 
 
 a 
 
34 THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUL 
 
 this is going on, education (in the widest and least 
 technical sense of the word) is doing its deadly 
 work a work which is not the less deadly be- 
 cause, things being as they are, it is in large 
 measure unavoidable its work of cramping, 
 warping, atrophying, devitalizing the growing 
 soul. For as a rule only so much of our inherited 
 potentiality is drawn upon in each case as will 
 enable the child to play with decent success the 
 part in life which circumstances controlled in 
 the main by the accident of his birth are likely 
 to assign to him. That amount varies greatly 
 from case to case. If a child is predestined to 
 enter one of the learned professions, an attempt 
 will be made by those who educate him to realize 
 potentialities which would remain dormant if 
 he were predestined to become a peasant or a 
 miner. But at best the amount which will be 
 realized by the time the child arrives at maturity 
 will be but an insignificant, and probably ill- 
 selected and inharmoniously distributed, fraction 
 of the mysterious whole. And the pity of it is 
 that, as students of human nature, we are apt to 
 assume that tendencies which have been left un- 
 cultivated artistic, musical, literary, scientific, 
 social, or whatever they may be do not exist. 
 The son of an agricultural labourer grows up an 
 uncouth and uncultured boor ; and we assume 
 off-hand that he had no inherent capacity for 
 refinement or culture ; but it is possible, to say 
 
HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 35 
 
 the least, that had he been brought up in a refined 
 and cultured family he would have made as 
 good a response to the stimulus of the environ- 
 ment as if he had been born a child of the house. 
 
 Things being as they are, then, the student of 
 human nature has to choose between two alter- 
 natives. In the baby the higher nature of man 
 has not yet begun to reveal itself. In the adult 
 or even in the adolescent it has almost certainly 
 been marred and mutilated by injudicious and 
 inadequate " nurture." As it is better, on the 
 whole, to grope in the dark than to follow a 
 misleading sign-post, I propose to begin by ex- 
 ploring the unknown possibilities of the unde- 
 veloped child. This means that my adventures 
 and experiments will be imaginative rather than 
 practical, and that my appeals to experience will 
 in the main be appeals to reason and common sense . 
 
 At a very early age the baby will begin to talk. 
 In what language will he express himself ? That 
 will entirely depend on where and by whom he 
 is reared. He has it in him to speak a hundred 
 different languages. A friend of mine has brought 
 up an Italian child who was rescued as a baby 
 from the earthquake of Messina. That child 
 speaks English like a native. Had there been no 
 earthquake she would now be speaking a Sicilian 
 patois. Had she been adopted by a Russian, 
 she would be speaking Russian ; by a Frenchman, 
 French ; by a Chinaman, Chinese ; by a Negro, 
 
36 THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUL 
 
 a Negro dialect. In brief, she had a capacity for 
 learning any language or dialect that happened 
 to be spoken by those who surrounded her. And 
 so has every normal child. Her forefathers 
 may have been of pure Sicilian blood (if there 
 is such a thing) for countless generations ; but 
 they transmitted to her no special aptitude 
 for their own language. She may not have had 
 a drop of English blood in her veins. But she 
 learnt English in English surroundings as easily 
 as she would have learnt her mother's tongue in 
 Sicilian surroundings. What was transmitted 
 to her along what line or lines of descent I 
 cannot say was her racial inheritance, including 
 a general capacity for learning to talk. And as 
 every language and every sub-language patois, 
 dialect, or even prominent accent has behind 
 it a particular way of thinking and feeling, a 
 particular outlook on life, we may safely con- 
 jecture that every child has it in him at birth 
 to adapt himself to as many ways of thinking 
 and feeling and to adopt as many outlooks on 
 life as there are languages, and sub-languages, in 
 this world of ours. 
 
 When the baby emerges from infancy he will 
 have to be educated. Now all systems of educa- 
 tion, however much they may differ in other ways, 
 have one thing in common. They take for 
 granted that any child of normal ability can, if 
 reasonably industrious, learn any subject that 
 
HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 37 
 
 is suitable for his tender years. It does not 
 follow, as some educationists seem to think, that 
 every child ought to learn every conceivable 
 subject. Nor does it follow that the common 
 practice of forcing on children subjects for which 
 they have no natural inclination is justified. 
 Still the fact that children can, under compulsion, 
 learn subjects in which they take no interest and 
 can see but little meaning, shows that even the 
 average child has in him large reserves of mental 
 capacity, and that the assumption which under- 
 lies all our educational systems is to that extent 
 well grounded. Nor does the fact that many 
 children, when they leave school, have lost all 
 their interest in mental work and much of their 
 power of utilizing their latent capacity, prove 
 anything except that a cramping and sterilizing 
 environment can do much in the way of robbing 
 a child of his birthright. To argue from what 
 a child is when education has victimized him to 
 what he was at birth is in all probability to go 
 very far astray. 
 
 As the child grows up, the choice of a vocation 
 will devolve upon his parents or guardians. 
 What will they do ? Will they examine his 
 pedigree in order to see for what calling his 
 inherited tendencies have specially fitted him ? 
 No, they will look to his environment, past and 
 present, rather than to his lineage. They will 
 look to their own means, to the way in which 
 
38 THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUL 
 
 he has been educated, to the opportunities for 
 continuing his education, to the possibilities of 
 his being apprenticed to a trade, to the local 
 demand for labour, and other such matters, 
 and they will make their choice for him by refer- 
 ence to these considerations, unless indeed he 
 has some strongly pronounced inclination of 
 which they approve and which they are in a 
 position to gratify. They will take for granted 
 that if he is of average ability and is reasonably 
 industrious, he will be able, sooner or later, to be- 
 come proficient at any craft, or trade, or profession 
 for which his circumstances, including his educa- 
 tion, past and prospective, have fitted him. They 
 will take for granted that he has it in him to 
 make himself at home in a multitude of different 
 callings, and that it must in the main be left to 
 circumstances to determine which of these he is 
 to adopt. It is true that aptitudes vary. We 
 cannot all do all things equally well. There is 
 no one who is not better fitted for some pursuits 
 than for others. But there is no one who cannot, 
 if he chooses, make himself tolerably proficient 
 at any one of a large number of different pursuits. 
 And if the average adolescent, in spite of the 
 cramping pressure to which he has, almost in- 
 evitably, been subjected, has it in him to earn 
 his livelihood in so many different ways, does 
 it not follow that his inherent adaptability is 
 practically unlimited in other words, that he 
 
HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 39 
 
 has boundless reserves of potentiality to draw 
 upon ? Since the present war began our army 
 has expanded to ten times its previous strength. 
 How has this been done ? By men going into 
 it out of a hundred different callings and learning 
 what was a new trade for each of them, the trade 
 of war. And, though some of these apprentices 
 were doubtless apter pupils than others, so well 
 has the average Englishman, of whatever class 
 or calling, learnt this new trade, that our vast 
 army is now as efficient as it is resolute and brave. 
 What better proof could be given of the inherent 
 versatility of human nature, of the infinite 
 resourcefulness of the soul ? 
 
 Here, then, lineal heredity counts for very 
 little, whereas racial heredity, controlled and 
 guided by environment, counts for nearly every- 
 thing and seems to have an unlimited range. 
 But let us test the value of the conclusion which 
 we have reached, by making an imaginative 
 experiment. Let us arrange for a hundred 
 babies German, if you will to be born and 
 reared in ten foreign countries, ten in each say 
 in England, France, Russia, Spain, Italy, Holland, 
 Sweden, the United States, the Argentine, and 
 Brazil. Let us divide the inhabitants of each of 
 these ten countries into ten social grades land- 
 owners, peasants, merchants, shopkeepers, clerks, 
 manufacturers, artisans, civil servants, pro- 
 fessional men, ministers of religion. And let 
 
40 THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUL 
 
 us arrange in each country for the babies to be 
 brought up in these ten social grades, one in 
 each. Above all, let us arrange, in each case, 
 for German influences to be excluded from the 
 baby's life, if not from the day of its birth then 
 from as near to that date as possible. Let us 
 then look forward some twenty or thirty years. 
 What will have happened ? Can anyone doubt 
 that a large majority of the German babies will 
 have become loyal citizens of their adopted coun- 
 tries, and respectable members of their respective 
 social grades ? Some failures there will have 
 been among them. But probably not a higher 
 percentage than if they had belonged by birth 
 to the various countries which I have specified 
 and been born into the social grades in which 
 I have placed them. The chances are that each 
 of them will have accepted the " Kultur " of his 
 particular country 1 and (whether nominally or 
 really) the religion of his particular foster- 
 parents, and will have adopted the prejudices 
 and general outlook on life of his particular social 
 grade. 
 
 1 Were the career of one of these German babies to become 
 the theme of a story by one of our " heredity " novelists, we 
 should probably be told that when the baby became an adoles- 
 cent he began to be tormented with apparently unaccount- 
 able cravings for Sauerkraut and lager beer. I do not think 
 that those cravings would be felt. I think that from first 
 to last the transplanted German, provided that he got 
 enough to eat and drink, would be quite content with the 
 food and drink of his adopted country. 
 
HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 41 
 
 Consider what this means. Each of the babies 
 had it in him to play a hundred different parts 
 the part of an English squire, of a French artisan, 
 of a Russian peasant, of an American manu- 
 facturer, of a Dutch merchant, of an Italian 
 priest, of a Swedish official, and so on. What 
 vast potential resources he must have had at 
 his disposal ! Which particular part he had to 
 play was decided by " chance." But potentially 
 he was equal to all the parts and to as many 
 more as we might choose to assign to him. His 
 adaptability in fine reflected that of the whole 
 human race, and the range of his latent capacity 
 had no limits. 
 
 In this respect, if in no other, man stands 
 apart from all other living things. Even his 
 friend and companion, the dog, who probably 
 comes next to him in mental and moral develop- 
 ment, is separated from him as regards adapta- 
 bility by an impassable abyss. It is true that 
 the dog family can play a great variety of parts. 
 But this has been made possible, as anyone can 
 see at a glance, only by very strict physical 
 differentiation. Hence the supreme importance 
 of breeding from the dog-fancier's point of view. 
 Vocation, among dogs, is handed down from 
 father to son, not as a tradition but as a tendency 
 " in the blood." No amount of training could 
 convert a Newfoundland puppy into a sheep- 
 dog or enable a bulldog to course hares. With 
 
42 THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUL 
 
 man it is entirely different. In spite of the 
 distinctions of colour, with all that they imply, 
 and in spite of a host of minor variations in face 
 and figure, there is but one dominant human 
 type. And that one type, besides being able 
 to adapt itself to all climates and to a vast range 
 of material conditions, can take up an unlimited 
 number of different interests and pursuits. The 
 average baby has it in him, as we have seen, to 
 speak a hundred languages, to belong to a hundred 
 nations, to learn a hundred trades and professions, 
 to play a hundred parts in life. 
 
 And the infinitude of the racial inheritance 
 which the average baby brings with him into the 
 world is of many dimensions. The religious 
 phenomenon known as " conversion," with the 
 sudden transition which it sometimes effects 
 from the very worst in a man to the very best ; 
 the winning of V.C.'s and other rewards of courage 
 and self-sacrifice by criminals and other " detri- 
 mentals " on the field of battle ; the upsurging, 
 in moments of supreme crisis, of heroism and 
 self-devotion from unsuspected abysses in some 
 seemingly commonplace soul ; the sudden melt- 
 ing of a hardened heart in the sunshine of sym- 
 pathy and kindness ; the transforming influence 
 of the passion of personal love on a man's whole 
 attitude towards life, these and other phenomena 
 of a kindred nature, which, though necessarily 
 rare (for only exceptional combinations of circuin- 
 
HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 43 
 
 stances can produce them), are not therefore 
 to be regarded as abnormal, seem to show that 
 the unfathomed depths of man's racial nature 
 are as illimitable as its lateral range. "It is a 
 wonder," writes one of our war correspondents, 
 " that never palls but is always new : the spirit 
 which these men of ours possess from no matter 
 what corner of the Empire they may have come. 
 One wonders where the grumblers, the cowards, 
 the mean people whom one thought one met in 
 ordinary life have gone. They are not here. 
 Or, if they are, they are uplifted and transfigured. 
 They doubtless, many of them, could not express 
 it, but some wind has blown upon them, some 
 sense of comradeship and brotherhood inspires 
 them, something has made true soldiers and 
 gallant men of them all." Such a transformation 
 as is described in this passage is inexplicable 
 except on the assumption that there are immense 
 reserves of spiritual vitality in the soul of the 
 " plain average man," and that though for the 
 most part these forces lie dormant and undreamed 
 of, they can awake and energize when some great 
 crisis makes its mute appeal to the man's highest 
 self. 
 
 What is the explanation of this fundamental 
 paradox ? Why is it that whereas on the physical 
 plane our racial inheritance seems to be strictly 
 limited, on the higher levels of our being infinitude 
 seems to be of its very essence ? The answer to 
 
44 THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUL 
 
 this question may be given in a single word : 
 Consciousness. What consciousness is, how we 
 have acquired it, into what factors it admits of 
 being analysed, we cannot say. 1 What we can 
 say is, that though foreshadowings and " weak 
 beginnings " of it are to be found below the 
 level of human life, consciousness is a distinctively 
 human endowment, or rather it is the distinctively 
 human endowment, the feature which, more 
 than any other, differentiates us from all other 
 living things and is therefore characteristic of 
 man as man. Now consciousness, by enabling 
 man to look before and after, and also to look 
 all round an ever- widening horizon, throws open 
 to him all the resources of the universe, and in 
 doing so reveals to him in posse, if not in esse 
 corresponding resources in himself. In other 
 words, it raises, or tends to raise, "to infinity" 
 all his powers and tendencies which are not 
 merely physical. Thus it transforms instinct 
 into reason, blind purpose into self-determining 
 will, feeling into fellow-feeling, perception into 
 imagination, sensuous enjoyment into the quest 
 of ideal beauty, carnal desire into spiritual love, 
 communal devotion into the " enthusiasm of 
 
 1 We may, if we please, define consciousness as the self- 
 awareness of the soul, or, again, as the self -awareness of life. 
 But no definition can enable us to fathom its fundamental 
 mystery. If we would know what consciousness is, we must 
 turn for instruction to consciousness itself, and open our 
 hearts and minds to its dawning light. 
 
HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 45 
 
 humanity," the instinct of self-preservation into 
 the thirst for " eternal life." 
 
 In the awakening of consciousness life begins 
 to be aware of its own limitless possibilities. 
 Before consciousness awakes, the current of life 
 flows, blindly and instinctively, in a narrow 
 channel between containing walls which it may 
 never overpass. As consciousness awakes the 
 channel begins to widen, and a tidal wave flows 
 up it fraught with 
 
 " Murmurs and scents of the infinite sea." 
 
 That message from the sea is the revelation of 
 life to life, of self to self. Can we wonder that 
 the racial inheritance of the human goul has no 
 limit when consciousness, which is its differential 
 feature, is the very principle of infinitude in man's 
 life? 
 
 In respect, then, of its racial inheritance the 
 individual soul either is in itself a reservoir of 
 unlimited potentialities, or else has such a 
 reservoir at its command. What part does lineal 
 heredity play in its development ? We have 
 seen that on the physical plane our racial heritage 
 is far larger and far more significant than our 
 lineal heritage, the possession of eyes, for example, 
 being of far more consequence than the particular 
 colour of the eyes, the possession of a mouth 
 than the particular shape of the mouth, and so 
 on. Will it not be the same on the higher levels 
 
46 THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUL 
 
 of human life ? Will not the ratio between the 
 two heritages be at least maintained ? So one 
 instinctively argues. But we shall presently find 
 it necessary to look at the matter from a different 
 point of view. To speak of a ratio between two 
 finite or quasi-finite quantities is permissible. 
 But when one of the quantities is infinite and the 
 other unknown, the relation between the two 
 is scarcely one of ratio, in the accepted sense of 
 that word. 
 
 But let us for the moment assume that the 
 arithmetical or quasi-arithmetical point of view 
 holds good. Let us assume that our lineal 
 heritage is a more or less calculable quantity, 
 and let us try to determine its dimensions. We 
 shall find that, far from being the preponderant 
 element in human nature which it is sometimes 
 supposed to be, it is an elusive, a negligible, and 
 even a vanishing quantity. We shall find that 
 by far the larger part of what we attribute to 
 lineal heredity may just as plausibly, and indeed 
 with better reason, be attributed to environment 
 in other words, to racial heredity being allowed 
 to come into play. 
 
 Let us consider some concrete cases. 
 
 A, who is the child of disreputable parents, 
 grows up a ne'er-do-weel. B, who is the child 
 of respectable parents, grows up a respectable 
 citizen. Will it be seriously contended that A 
 inherits his disreputableness and B his respecta- 
 
HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 47 
 
 billty from their respective parents ? Is it not 
 more than probable that, had A and B exchanged 
 homes at birth, B would have become the ne'er- 
 do-weel and A the respectable citizen ? From 
 birth to maturity A has been exposed to the 
 influence of a bad, B of a good environment. 
 Considering how impressionable and imitative 
 children are, one may surely argue that the 
 vital difference in the respective environments of 
 the two boys is sufficient to account for the 
 divergence of their respective paths in life. 
 
 C, allowed from his earliest days to run wild 
 in a disorderly slum, acquires the language of 
 the gutter, and uses it with vigour and effect. 
 Will it be seriously contended that he inherited 
 a " foul mouth " from his parents ? Is it not 
 practically certain that if a princeling had been 
 exposed at the same tender age to the same 
 influences he too would have become a master 
 of oaths and obscenities ? 
 
 D, the son of drunken parents, takes to drink 
 at an early age. Was he born into the world 
 with a latent craving for alcohol ? He may 
 have inherited from his parents some slight 
 infirmity of will. But in the main his downfall 
 must surely be attributed to his unfortunate 
 environment. His parents, in their moments of 
 maudlin affection, may well have initiated him 
 into their own ways. In any case he spent the 
 most impressionable years of his life in a demora- 
 
48 THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUL 
 
 lizing atmosphere ; and a bad example was 
 habitually set him by those whom he was natur- 
 ally prone to imitate. 
 
 E, having been persistently bullied by his 
 parents and school-teachers, takes to bullying 
 his younger brothers and smaller schoolfellows. 
 Is there a strain of bullying in his blood ? We 
 cannot say. What we can say is that in all proba- 
 bility he, like D, succumbed to the influences of 
 a demoralizing atmosphere, and imitated those 
 whom he naturally made his models. 
 
 These are some of the failures in life. As it 
 is with the failures so it is with the successes. 
 The respectable son of respectable parents has 
 been taught from his earliest days to idealize 
 respectability. The prosperous son of prosperous 
 parents has always been accustomed to regard 
 prosperity as his birthright. The refined and 
 cultivated son of refined and cultivated parents 
 has grown up in an atmosphere of refinement 
 and culture. The musical son of musical parents, 
 the artistic son of artistic parents each of 
 these owes something to inherited temperament, 
 but he owes at least as much and probably 
 more to the subtly plastic influences, musical 
 and artistic, which began to act upon him while 
 he was still in his mother's arms. 
 
 I could add to such cases indefinitely. When- 
 ever I hear it said that such and such a disposi- 
 tion or such and such a trait is inherited from 
 
HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 49 
 
 parents or ancestors, I ask myself whether an 
 alliance between racial heredity and environ- 
 ment will not adequately account for the given 
 phenomenon, and I almost invariably find that 
 it seems to do so. I ask the same question let 
 me say in passing and am able to give the same 
 answer when I am told by Mr. H. Chamberlain 
 and others that national characteristics the 
 independence and reserve of the Englishman, the 
 " canniness " of the Scot, the lawlessness of the 
 Irishman, the pride of the Spaniard, the arrogance 
 and servility of the German are " in the blood " 
 of the several peoples, for I find that in every 
 case the explanation of the predominance of the 
 given trait seems to be historical rather than 
 racial (in the narrow sense of the word). 
 
 But if familiar causes suffice to account for 
 a given phenomenon, why should we try to 
 account for it on grounds which are at best 
 dubious and insecure ? We know what we are 
 talking about when we say that children are 
 impressionable and imitative. We do not know 
 what we are talking about when we say that 
 mental and moral qualities are "in the blood." 
 Let us at least exhaust the possibilities of the 
 known before we invoke the aid of the unknown. 
 
 How comes it, then, that the fantastic belief 
 in lineal heredity as the predominant factor in 
 the formation of mentality and character prevails 
 4 
 
50 THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUL 
 
 so widely ? Partly, I think, because the orthodox 
 doctrine of the supernatural origin of the in- 
 dividual soul is falling into disrepute, and physio- 
 logy seems to a certain type of mind to provide 
 the only alternative to it. But chiefly, I think, 
 for two reasons, each of which is based on an inter- 
 pretation of facts which really point to a widely 
 different conclusion. We believe in the constrain- 
 ing force of lineal heredity because the infinite 
 variety of human development and the infinite 
 diversity or apparent diversity of human gifts 
 and endowments leads us to concentrate our 
 attention on the differential elements in human 
 nature and to lose sight of the common elements. 
 And we believe in it because " pure breeding," 
 whether in a family, a tribe, a people, or a class, 
 does in each case undoubtedly tend to preserve 
 a particular type of character and a particular 
 outlook on life. 
 
 Let us first consider the former reason. The 
 infinite variety of human life, as it manifests 
 itself in history or as it unfolds itself, in all its 
 length and breadth, before our eyes the fact 
 that there seem to be innumerable types of human 
 beings, that in many cases each human being 
 seems to be a type in himself has led careless 
 observers to conclude that lineal heredity domin- 
 ates human nature on all its higher planes. Two 
 men living in adjoining houses may have so little 
 in common, except on the physical and mental 
 
HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 51 
 
 planes, that they seem to belong to entirely 
 different species. A has moral and spiritual 
 qualities which are not merely lacking but are 
 actually inverted in B. What then ? Is there 
 no such thing as human nature ? If two trees, 
 similar in many respects, bore edible and poisonous 
 fruit respectively, we should say that they be- 
 longed to different species. Is it not the same 
 with men ? If B hates where A loves, if B lies 
 where A speaks the truth, if B is self-centred 
 where A is self-forgetful, if B is self-indulgent 
 where A is self-restrained, and so on, do not A 
 and B belong to different species of the genus 
 Man ? If this is so, how are we to account for 
 the disruption of the human race into so many 
 species ? If it is not so, how are we to account 
 for the facts ? 
 
 " To those who chattered Rousseau," says Dr. 
 Hay ward, " Herbart flung the question, * What 
 is the nature of Man ? ' " The naturalists who 
 interest themselves in psychology are divided, 
 as we have seen, into great schools, the school 
 of "Nature" and the school of "Nurture." 
 These schools have one doctrine in common 
 namely, that there is no such thing as human 
 nature, in the Herbartian sense of the phrase, 
 no such thing as the " true manhood " of which 
 Proebel dreamed, no such thing as a central, 
 magisterial, all-controlling, all-explaining stream 
 of tendency in human nature, which is waiting 
 
52 THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUL 
 
 to assert itself in every man and which is there- 
 fore characteristic of man as man. But their 
 interpretations of the fact on which they base 
 this negative conclusion the bewildering diver- 
 sity of human development are diametrically 
 opposed to, and may perhaps be held to cancel, 
 one another. The " Nature " school attribute 
 that diversity to the unscientific intermixture 
 of the different " strains " of Humanity. The 
 " Nurture " school attribute it to the infinite 
 variety and complexity of man's environment, 
 which causes a different inscription, so to speak, 
 to be written by the " moving finger " of Fate 
 on the " neutral clean sheet " of each individual 
 soul. There is a third interpretation which is, 
 I think, at once less fantastic and less fatalistic 
 than either of these, and more in keeping with 
 the relevant facts. That the variety of man's 
 life reflects the variety of his environment may 
 be freely admitted. But to predicate activity 
 of man's environment and passivity of man him- 
 self, alone among living beings, is surely to 
 invert the true order of things. The oak-tree 
 is in the acorn ; and in the absence of con- 
 vincing proof to the contrary, I must believe 
 that whatever a man may become, in response to 
 the influences that are brought to bear on him, 
 that he has it in him to be. If, then, the variety 
 of man's life reflects the variety of his environ- 
 ment, the reason is that in response to the ever- 
 
HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 53 
 
 varying stimulus of his environment man de- 
 velops himself in ten thousand different direc- 
 tions ; and the reasonwhy he is able to do this is 
 that he has inexhaustible reserves of potentiality 
 to draw upon or, in other words, that his 
 racial, as opposed to his lineal, inheritance has 
 no limits. 
 
 But here we must distinguish between the 
 individual and the race. For man as man the 
 environment is world- wide and infinitely varied. 
 For this or that man the immediately available 
 environment is, as a rule, strictly limited and 
 comparatively monotonous. It is true that 
 beyond the immediately available environment 
 there is room for indefinite advance and expansion. 
 A farm labourer, for example, may also be a 
 member of the Catholic Church, and a citizen 
 of the United Kingdom ; and he may have it in 
 him to react to the stimulus of each of these 
 environing communities. But the pressure of 
 what I have called the immediately available 
 environment the material conditions of a man's 
 life, the restrictions imposed on him by his up- 
 bringing, the limiting influences inherent in his 
 calling and his social grade, and the like is at 
 all times strong, and, as the years go by, may 
 well acquire irresistible strength. Potentially, 
 however, this man or that man and man as man 
 may almost be said to coincide. The contrast 
 between the greatness of the individual's ideal 
 
54 THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUL 
 
 destiny and the littleness of his actual destiny 
 is indeed the supreme tragedy of man's life. 
 
 Yet in that supreme tragedy man holds the 
 title-deeds of his great inheritance. Because 
 the environment of man as man is world-wide 
 and infinitely varied, and the environment of 
 this or that man is by comparison narrow and 
 monotonous, there is room and to spare for each 
 individual environment to have a distinctive 
 character of its own which reflects itself in the 
 character of the individual who responds to it. 
 And the inference to be drawn from this fact is 
 not that there are innumerable species of the 
 genus Man, but that man as man has it in him 
 to respond and adapt himself to any and every 
 environment. In other words, if each individual 
 in turn can surround himself with a little world of 
 his own by reference to which his individuality 
 is developed and defined, the reason is that, on 
 the one hand, as A or B or C, he is strictly limited 
 by material and quasi-material conditions, and, 
 on the other hand, as a human being, he has the 
 whole Universe at his command ; and the reason 
 why, as a human being, he has the whole Universe 
 at his -command, is that its infinitude reflects 
 itself in his reflects itself in the limitless reserves 
 of potentiality which constitute his racial in- 
 heritance, and which make it possible for him to 
 respond to every pressure and react to every 
 stimulus. Thus the bewildering diversity of 
 
HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 55 
 
 human development, which has generated the 
 belief in the omnipotence of lineal heredity, in 
 reality bears witness to man's infinite adapta- 
 bility ; and infinite adaptability, being potentially 
 common to all men, is inherited by a man not 
 from his lineal ancestors, but from the whole 
 human race. 
 
 And this is not all. It is not merely because 
 he is infinitely adaptable that man is able to 
 develop himself in so many different directions, 
 but because, as a conscious being, he can react 
 upon and even control his environment, and 
 through his control of it can bring an infinite 
 variety of transforming influences to bear upon 
 himself. We have seen that consciousness is the 
 principle of infinitude in man's life, that it raises 
 to infinity all his higher powers and faculties, 
 changing, for example, instinct into reason, 
 perception into imagination, blind purpose into 
 self-determining will, and so on. By raising his 
 powers and faculties to infinity, consciousness 
 extends his environment, potentially if not 
 actually, to the uttermost limits of the Universe. 
 For we mean by a man's environment so much 
 of the Universe as he is able to react to ; and 
 as man's perceptive, reflective, and volitional 
 faculties expand, the sphere of his reactivity 
 expands proportionately until he finds himself 
 the centre of an almost illimitable world. Or we 
 may, if we please, invert the order of causation 
 
56 THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUL 
 
 and say that, by indefinitely expanding his 
 environment, consciousness raises to infinity 
 man's powers and faculties. For so greatly does 
 the world in which he lives expand in the dawn- 
 ing light of consciousness that he finds himself 
 compelled in self-defence to study the laws of 
 his ever-widening environment, to realize its 
 latent possibilities, to make his choice, again 
 and again, among its resources. In his attempt 
 to study its laws, instinct gradually transforms 
 itself into reason. In his attempt to realize its 
 latent possibilities, perception transforms itself 
 into imagination. In his attempt to choose 
 among its resources, blind purpose transforms 
 itself into self-determining will. As these 
 characteristically human faculties unfold them- 
 selves, it becomes possible for a man not merely 
 to react to his environment, but to react upon 
 it, to master it in some measure, to make experi- 
 ments with it, to modify it in many ways, to 
 make it subservient to his needs, to mould it to 
 his desires, to open his heart to some of its in- 
 fluences, to harden his heart against others, to 
 expand it till it embraces all the stars of heaven, 
 to narrow it till it shrinks to the dimensions of 
 a miser's garret. 1 
 
 1 With the power of modifying and even transforming 
 one's own environment comes the power of affecting, in 
 greater or less degree, the environment of others. Each of 
 us, as he goes through life, is the centre of an ever-moving 
 circle of disturbance. In some cases the circle is wide ; in 
 
HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 57 
 
 In reacting on his environment, man reacts, 
 through his environment, on his own develop- 
 ment. And his capacity for so reacting is un- 
 limited. The response of a plant or an animal 
 to environment is blind, instinctive, and involun- 
 tary. The response of man, at any rate on the 
 higher levels of his being, is, in varying degrees, 
 conscious, intelligent, and deliberate. The differ- 
 ence between the two responses is the difference 
 between what is finite and what is infinite. The 
 communal devotion of ants or bees is mechanically 
 perfect, and varies nothing from ant to ant or 
 from bee to bee ; but it is what it is " finished 
 and finite " and cannot possibly become any- 
 thing else. The communal devotion of human 
 beings varies from man to man and never attains 
 to perfection, which Is an ideal, not an accom- 
 plished fact ; but it is capable of soaring to 
 the sublimest height of patriotism or widening 
 out into the " enthusiasm of humanity." And 
 it owes its range and its variety to the trans- 
 forming influence of consciousness. This example 
 is typical. Consciousness, the most distinctively 
 human of all man's endowments, is the ultimate 
 
 others the majority it is comparatively narrow ; but it is 
 always wide enough to involve many lives besides one's own. 
 In a very real sense each of us is his brother's keeper. His 
 own bearing in life inevitably reacts for good or for evil 
 upon the lives of others, affecting some profoundly, others 
 only slightly, but touching many lives and influencing in 
 some degree all that it touches. 
 
58 THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUL 
 
 source of that bewildering diversity of human 
 development which is apt to blind our eyes to the 
 fundamental unity of our higher nature that 
 diversity which the " Nurture " school of psycho- 
 logists try to account for by reference to the 
 tyranny of environment, and the " Nature " 
 school by reference to the tyranny of " blood." 
 That bewildering diversity would not be possible 
 if each of us, as his racial birthright, had not 
 unlimited reserves of potentiality to draw upon. 
 Still less would it be possible if the dawning light 
 of consciousness did not reveal to us, little by 
 little, our inward possibilities and outward 
 resources, and so stimulate us, each in his own 
 way and his own degree, to enter into possession 
 of our inheritance. 
 
 In conclusion. The profound differences be- 
 tween man and man which suggest to some minds 
 that the human race has broken up, under the 
 influence of haphazard breeding, into a multitude 
 of species, and that lineal heredity is therefore 
 the main factor in man's development, and the 
 supreme arbiter of his destiny, really point to a 
 diametrically opposite conclusion. The differ- 
 ences between man and man are caused by 
 human nature the nature of man as man 
 striving to realize its vast potentialities, in 
 response to the stimulus of an environment which 
 for each of us is ideally infinite, but actually 
 limited by material conditions and other 
 
HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 59 
 
 restrictive influences, and also perpetually reacted 
 upon and modified by the man himself and his 
 fellow-men. In other words, " the many " are 
 generated by the self-realisation of " the One " ; 
 and " the One " the fundamental unity and 
 totality of human nature is at the heart of 
 each individual man. 
 
 I have said that another reason why the 
 fatalistic belief in the force of heredity prevails 
 BO widely is that pure breeding, whether in a 
 family, a tribe, a nation, a class, or a caste, 
 does undoubtedly safeguard and tend to per- 
 petuate the tradition that dominates the parti- 
 cular environment into which the individual is 
 born. There is a widespread prejudice against 
 marrying into another nation than one's own. 
 There is a still stronger prejudice against marry- 
 ing into a lower social grade. And the prejudice 
 against marrying into another coloured race is 
 so strong that those who offend against it, especi- 
 ally if they belong to the politically dominant 
 race, are regarded as social outcasts and shunned 
 by their relations and friends. These prejudices 
 are by no means unreasonable. It not unfre- 
 quently happens that the children of " mixed 
 marriages " have the failings of both breeds and 
 the virtues of neither. But why ? Not because 
 their blood is impure, but because they are born 
 into two distinct traditions, and that those tra- 
 
60 THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUL 
 
 ditions mix badly, if they do not actually refuse 
 to mix. By a tradition I mean the way of 
 looking at life and dealing with life which has 
 grown up among and is now characteristic of a 
 particular race, or a particular community, or 
 a particular class, or even a particular family. 
 Pure breeding ensures the maintenance of such 
 a tradition ; and those who are in the tradition 
 and value it are right to object to marrying 
 into a tradition which is antagonistic to or even 
 seriously divergent from their own. But they 
 are wrong to give as their reason for objecting 
 to it that they do not wish to contaminate their 
 blood. What they really mean is that they do 
 not wish to undermine or otherwise impair the 
 tradition in which they have been reared and 
 to which they cling. The notation in which we 
 express ourselves in such cases needs to be 
 revised. When we say that a man comes of a 
 good stock or has good blood in his veins, we 
 mean that he is born into and brought up in 
 a good tradition. When we say that he is well- 
 bred, we mean that, owing to the accident of 
 his birth, he has been, or at least might have 
 been, well brought up. We attribute to " nature" 
 what is really due to " nurture." I have else- 
 where referred to the case of the hybrid Eurasian 
 and the pure-bred Jew of the Pale ; and as what 
 I said then still seems to me to hold good, I may 
 perhaps be allowed to quote my own words : 
 
HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 61 
 
 "It is sometimes said that the Eurasian in 
 Hindostan has the faults of both the races from 
 which he springs. In reality he has the faults 
 of two widely dissimilar environments. For 
 he is in the unhappy position of having a leg in 
 each of two dissevered worlds. If he could be 
 brought up from his birth either as an English- 
 man or as a Hindoo, all might be well with him. 
 But it is his fate to be brought up both as an 
 Englishman and as a Hindoo, and he is therefore 
 perpetually torn asunder between two great 
 and ancient civilizations whi'ch have so long 
 been kept apart that they now refuse to 
 blend. ..." " The case of the Jew is interest- 
 ing and to the point. Here, at any rate ' within 
 the Pale,' purity of blood has been strictly main- 
 tained, and a social life, based on Pharisaic 
 legalism, has continued unchanged from the 
 time of the Dispersal to the present day. Does 
 it follow that legalism is in the blood of the modern 
 Jew ? By no means. What has happened is 
 that the purity of his blood has given him a 
 homogeneous and practically unvarying environ- 
 ment, to the full force of which each individual 
 member of the race is exposed from the moment 
 of his birth. Where there are no marriages, and 
 therefore little or no social intercourse, with 
 outsiders, the same conception of life, the same 
 scheme of life, the same culture, the same civiliza- 
 tion, are handed down from generation to genera- 
 
62 THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUL 
 
 tion, and the pressure of their influence on the 
 individual is well-nigh irresistible. But let the 
 Jew emerge from the Pale, and intermarry 
 with the Gentile, and he speedily shuffles off the 
 oppressive burden of the Law." l 
 
 If these things are so ; if the tragedy of the 
 Eurasian is caused, not by two widely different 
 strains of blood meeting in his veins, but by two 
 widely different civilizations meeting in his life ; 
 if the legalism of the pure-bred Jew has come 
 down to him as a tradition, and only as a tradition 
 fifteen centuries of strict in-breeding having 
 apparently failed to infuse a single atom of it 
 into his blood ; if (to take another case) in 
 Paraguay, at the present day, " thanks to a 
 homogeneous environment, we have remarkable 
 homogeneity of character co-existing with almost 
 unparalleled hybridity of race " can we resist 
 the inference that the response of human nature 
 the generic nature of man to the stimulus 
 of environment is the main factor in the formation 
 of character, and that breeding only counts 
 because, and so far as, it serves to guide and 
 control the formative influences of environment ? 
 
 1 In Defence of What Might Be, pp. 364-6. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE THEORY OF STRAIN 
 
 FROM the position which I reached at the end 
 of the last chapter I pass on to the conclusion that 
 the theory of " strain," as expounded by Pro- 
 fessor Bateson and other naturalists, though 
 it may hold good in an appreciable degree of 
 man's physique, does not hold good of his char- 
 acter. The psychological and sociological im- 
 plications of the theory of strain are so important 
 that the question of its applicability to the higher 
 levels of human nature deserves the most careful 
 consideration. In his Address to the British 
 Association at Melbourne, Professor Bateson 
 supports his thesis that " of the overwhelmingly 
 greater significance of ' nature ' (in human life) 
 there is no longer any possibility of doubt " by 
 an appeal to " the universal experience of the 
 breeder, whether of plants or animals, that strain 
 is absolutely essential, that though bad condi- 
 tions may easily enough spoil a good strain, 
 yet that under the best of conditions a bad strain 
 will never give a fine result." This argument 
 
 63 
 
64 THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUL 
 
 begs the question which is in dispute. To argue 
 from the facts of plant and animal life to the 
 possibilities of human life is permissible on 
 two conditions. The thinker must satisfy him- 
 self that, as his argument develops, the analogy 
 between the two kinds of life continues to hold 
 good. And he must decline to accept the con- 
 sequent conclusions until they have been verified 
 in greater or less degree, by observation or 
 experiment, or both. Neither of these conditions 
 has been fulfilled by Professor Bateson. He 
 assumes at the outset that the analogy between 
 the two kinds of life is absolute and final ; that 
 it virtually amounts to identity ; in other words, 
 that man is an animal and nothing more. And 
 he makes no attempt to verify his conclusion. 
 The question which is really in dispute is this : 
 Does the biological theory of " strain " apply 
 to the higher or more spiritual levels of human 
 nature ? If it does, the " universal experience 
 of the breeder " may fairly be appealed to. 
 But until we have satisfied ourselves that it 
 does until we have satisfied ourselves, for 
 example, that the " lower orders " are, in respect 
 of mentality and character, of an inferior strain 
 to the " upper classes " the experience of the 
 breeder counts for nothing in this controversy, 
 and Professor Bateson's argument must be ruled 
 out of court. 
 
 In order to make his point of view clear Pro- 
 
THE THEORY OP STRAIN 65 
 
 fessor Bateson reviews and criticizes a passage 
 in my book What is and What Might Be. 1 In order 
 to make my point of view clear, I will quote 
 his criticism and then reply to it : 
 
 " Having witnessed the success of a great 
 teacher in helping unpromising peasant children 
 to develop their natural powers, he (the author 
 of What is and What Might Be) gives us the 
 following botanical parallel. Assuming that the 
 wild bullace is the origin of domesticated plums, 
 he tells us that by cultivation the bullace can 
 no doubt be improved so as to become a better 
 bullace, but by no means can the bullace be made 
 to bear plums. All this is sound biology ; but 
 translating these facts into the human analogy, 
 he declares that the work of the successful teacher 
 shows that with man the facts are otherwise, 
 
 1 Professor Bateson speaks of my book as " charming 
 though pathetic." I am glad that it charmed so competent 
 a judge. But why does he call it pathetic ? Does he think 
 that I am one of the " educationists " whom " faith, not 
 evidence, . . . encourages to hope so greatly in the ameliora- 
 ting conditions of life " ? If he does, let me assure him 
 that, on the contrary, it is evidence, not (mere) faith, which 
 has made me an optimist as regards the efficacy of " nurture" 
 in general and education in particular. For many years, if 
 I did not actually believe, I certainly took for granted, that 
 the upper classes were of a superior " strain " to the lower, 
 and I had therefore but little faith in the transforming in- 
 fluence of education. But experience, in " Egeria's ' ' and other 
 schools, convinced me, late in life, that my arrogant assump- 
 tion was a mere superstition, and that the lower classes were 
 as well able to respond to the stimulus of a vivifying education 
 as the upper. 
 
 5 
 
66 THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUL 
 
 and that the average rustic child, whose normal 
 ideal is ' bullacehood,' can become the rare ex- 
 ception, developing to a stage corresponding with 
 that of the plum. But the naturalist knows 
 exactly where the parallel is at fault. For . . . 
 the bullace is breeding approximately true, 
 whereas the human crop, like jute and various 
 cottons, is in a state of polymorphic mixture. 
 The population of many English villages may 
 be compared with the crop which would result 
 from sowing a bushel of kernels gathered mostly 
 from the hedges with an occasional few from the 
 orchard. If anyone asks how there are any plum- 
 kernels in the sample at all, he may find the 
 answer perhaps in spontaneous variation, but 
 more probably in the appearance of a long 
 hidden recession. For the want of that genetic 
 variation, consisting probably, as I have argued, 
 in loss of inhibiting factors, by which the plum 
 arose from the wild form, neither food, nor educa- 
 tion, nor hygiene can in any way atone. Many 
 wild plants are half-starved through competition, 
 and transferred to garden soil they grow much 
 bigger ; so good conditions might certainly 
 enable the bullace population to develop beyond 
 the stunted physical and mental status they 
 commonly attain, but plums they can never be." 
 What does the last sentence in this paragraph 
 mean ? Is Professor Bateson denying my facts, 
 or is he merely denying the possibility of human 
 
THE THEORY OF STRAIN 67 
 
 bullaces being transformed into human plums? 
 I think he is denying my facts. Had I said that 
 some of the Utopian bullaces developed into 
 plums, and had I attributed this to "Egeria's" 
 transforming influence, Professor Bateson's ex- 
 planation of what happened would certainly 
 have been worth considering. But I said then, 
 and I say now with equal emphasis, that before 
 they left " Egeria's " school, all or nearly all the 
 Utopian bullaces had become plums ; in other 
 words, that the average child had developed 
 certain plum-like qualities which I enumerated 
 in my book namely, " activity, versatility, 
 imaginative sympathy, a large and free outlook, 
 self-forge tfulness, charm of manner, joy of 
 heart." l When I say this I am stating what I 
 believe to be a fact. Now a fact, or rather the 
 report of a fact, must either be accepted or 
 rejected. If it is accepted, the logical conse- 
 quences of accepting it must also be accepted. 
 If it is rejected, the rejection must be based on 
 one (or both) of two grounds. The first is that 
 the reporter either misread the evidence of his 
 senses, or, if he spoke from hearsay, was mis- 
 informed. The second is that the reported fact is 
 intrinsically quite incredible. Professor Bateson 
 cannot from his owne xperience deny the fact that 
 I have reported, for he never visited " Egeria's " 
 
 1 That these are plum-like qualities will, I think, be 
 generally admitted. 
 
68 THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUL 
 
 school. But because his theories fail to account 
 for the fact, he rejects it off-hand, though it is 
 not intrinsically incredible, on purely a priori 
 grounds. Such a proceeding is unworthy of a 
 scientific mind. I have always understood that 
 when a fact collides with a theory, it is the 
 latter, not the former, that goes to the wall. A 
 witty Frenchman has made fun of the scientists 
 who will not allow that any phenomenon can 
 take place which official science has not authorized 
 Nature to produce. Professor Bateson goes 
 further than this. For he will not allow that 
 human nature can bear any fruit which his 
 biological theories, based on the study of plants 
 and animals only, have not authorized it to bear. 
 In taking up this attitude he leans too heavily 
 on the argument from analogy. It is useless for 
 him to tell me that because no amount of culture 
 can enable a bullace-tree to bear plums, therefore 
 the average Utopian child could not have 
 developed the plum-like qualities with which I 
 credited him. I say that he did develop those 
 qualities, and that judicious and sympathetic 
 culture enabled him to do so. 
 
 But perhaps Professor Bateson is merely deny- 
 ing in general terms that human bullaces can 
 be transformed into human plums. If so, he is 
 probably right. But if he is, and if my facts 
 hold good, his theory of " strain," so far as it 
 applies to human beings, goes to the wall. I 
 
THE THEORY OF STRAIN 69 
 
 am grateful to Professor Bateson for having 
 compelled me to re-read the passage which he 
 criticized. For I see now that there is a serious 
 flaw in my argument, a flaw which escaped my 
 notice when I composed the passage. I assumed 
 that the rustic inhabitants of Utopia were a 
 " bullace population " ; in other words, that 
 they belonged for the most part to an inferior 
 " strain." Whether I really believed this when 
 I wrote my book I cannot say for certain. It 
 is possible that a superstition of which I had 
 but recently, under " Egeria's " influence, begun 
 to divest myself, still lingered in my mind the 
 superstition that the " lower orders " are by 
 birth and breeding our inferiors in mentality 
 and character. In any case, I wrote as if I was 
 still the victim of that superstition ; and I 
 therefore claimed by implication that " Egeria " 
 had wrought a miracle. Professor Bateson might 
 have reminded me that, as miracles do not happen, 
 if "Egeria's" pupils really reached the plum level, 
 they must have been plums in posse from their 
 earliest days. But instead of doing this he 
 assumed, with me, that the bulk of the Utopian 
 children belonged to the bullace breed, and 
 argued from this that they could not and did 
 not develop into plums. My answer to this 
 argument an answer which I will repeat as often 
 as it is called for is that plums those children 
 certainly were, and plums of a very high quality, 
 
70 THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUL 
 
 that the average Utopian child was in fact a 
 better specimen of plumhood than the average 
 product of what we call " good breeding " and 
 " gentle birth." And I can now draw for myself 
 the inference from my own premises which Pro- 
 fessor Bateson might have drawn for me (if only 
 to reject it, when drawn) that neither mentally 
 nor morally are the lower classes inferior at birth 
 to the upper ; that the average peasant in parti- 
 cular is not a bullace, but a plum a plum 
 which, owing to the combined influences of poor 
 soil, unfavourable climate, and unskilful culture, 
 has missed its high destiny and fallen below 
 the normal level of plum growth. 
 
 How completely Professor Bateson, as an 
 interpreter of human nature, is obsessed by the 
 biological theory of " strain " is shown by the 
 following passages in his Melbourne Address : 
 " Modern statesmanship aims rightly at helping 
 those who have got sown as wildings to come 
 into their proper class ; but let not anyone 
 suppose such a policy democratic in its ultimate 
 effects, for no course of action can be more 
 effective in strengthening the upper classes, 
 while weakening the lower." l . ..." In all 
 practical schemes for social reform the congenital 
 
 1 The theory which Professor Bateson has expounded 
 must surely have originated in Germany. One can imagine 
 with what gusto the Hohenzollerns and the Prussian Junkers 
 would lay its flattering unction to their souls. One might 
 
THE THEORY OF STRAIN 71 
 
 diversity, the essential polymorphism of all 
 civilized communities must be recognized as a 
 fundamental fact, and reformers should rather 
 direct their efforts to facilitating and rectifying 
 class distinctions, than to any futile attempt 
 to abolish them. . . . The instability of society 
 is due, not to inequality, which is inherent and 
 congenital, but to the fact that in periods of 
 rapid change like the present convection currents 
 are set up such that the elements of the strata 
 get intermixed and the apparent stratification 
 corresponds only roughly with the genetic." 
 
 These passages set one thinking. When one 
 remembers by what methods the " upper classes " 
 in this and other countries, and in this and other 
 ages, have gained the upper hand, how largely 
 they have owed their ascendancy to force or 
 to fraud or to a judicious mixture of force and 
 fraud, how much of their reputed ability has 
 been sheer unscrupulousness, how much of their 
 reputed force of character has been ruthless 
 self-assertion one begins to wonder what are 
 the qualities, superiority in which differentiates 
 the " high-born " aristocracy from the " low- 
 born " populace. Are they the qualities which 
 Christ pronounced blessed in the Sermon on 
 
 even conjecture that the professor who elaborated it, if of 
 " bullace " origin, was raised to the " plum " level by royal 
 mandate and made a " von" in recognition of his newly- 
 accjuired superior strain. 
 
72 THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUL 
 
 the Mount ? I doubt it. As I turn the pages 
 of history I find that again and again the 
 ungodly flourished like a green bay-tree 
 flourished so triumphantly that he was able to 
 bequeath his ill-gotten prosperity to the third 
 and fourth, and even to the tenth, generation of 
 his descendants. In such a case did the successful 
 scoundrel bequeath his character as well as his 
 position and wealth ? According to Professor 
 Bateson he must have done so. But, if he did, 
 there is surely a flaw in his descendants' title to 
 social and political ascendancy. 
 
 Professor Bateson has raised an interesting 
 and difficult question. Will he help us to answer 
 it ? Are his " upper classes " an aristocracy of 
 physique, of intellect, of morals, of spirituality ? 
 That they are " inherently and congenitally " 
 superior in all four directions is a proposition 
 which those who are well acquainted with both 
 classes will laugh to scorn, and which even 
 Professor Bateson will scarcely have the hardi- 
 hood to maintain. Were the robber knights of 
 the Rhine, are the arrogant barons of East Prussia 
 and the Baltic Provinces " high-born " ? Are the 
 Franciscan brothers and srsters, whose ideal of life 
 has always been diametrically opposed to that 
 of knight or baron, " low-born " ? The pedigree 
 of a dog or a horse is recorded in certain unmis- 
 takable features. In what features, inward or 
 outward, does Nature record the pedigree of the 
 
THE THEORY OF STRAIN 73 
 
 " high-born " or the " low-born " man ? This is 
 a point on which Professor Bateson would do 
 well to enlighten us, but on which he prefers to 
 keep silence. 
 
 Let us try to answer the question which he has 
 left unanswered. He seems to take for granted 
 that the upper classes in this country the nobility, 
 gentry, and professional men, let us say are 
 mostly plums, and that the lower classes the 
 peasants, miners, and artisans, let us say are 
 mostly bullaces. Wherein, then, do the upper 
 classes show their inherent and congenital 
 superiority to the lower ? That they are richer, 
 better educated, and have more social and 
 political influence goes without saying. But in 
 the first place a man may be rich, well-educated, 
 and influential, and yet be a base-souled villain ; 
 and in the second place riches, education, and 
 social and political influence belong to a man's 
 environment rather than to his blood. That 
 they are of superior physique may perhaps be 
 admitted, though even in this respect the differ- 
 ence between the two classes at birth is com- 
 paratively small, the physical superiority of the 
 average adult specimen of the upper classes being 
 largely due to healthier surroundings and better 
 food. That they are superior in mental power 
 is disputable, to say the least. The adult peasant 
 is no doubt less cultured and less intellectual 
 than the adult " gentleman " ; but he has been 
 
74 THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUL 
 
 exposed from his birth, both at home and in 
 school, to much less favourable educational 
 influences, and it is to this rather than to any 
 inherited inferiority that his short-comings, cul- 
 tural and intellectual, are probably due. What 
 the inherent and congenital mentality of the 
 lower classes really is, or how it compares with 
 that of the upper classes, we do not know. What 
 we do know is that the peasant, the miner, and 
 the artisan are born into a cramping and depress- 
 ing environment, the product of social and 
 economic causes, from which they cannot easily 
 escape and in which it is as difficult for their 
 mental powers to unfold as for a tree to thrive in 
 an exposed situation or a poor soil. This fact 
 invites imaginative conjecture as to what might 
 be or might have been. The psychology of Gray's 
 Elegy, which wisely limits itself to " perhaps " 
 and "may," is, I believe, absolutely sound: 
 
 Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid 
 Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire ; 
 Hands that the rod of empire might have sway'd 
 Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre : 
 
 But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page 
 Rich with the spoils of time, did ne'er unroll ; 
 Chill Penury repressed their noble rage, 
 And froze the genial current of the soul, 
 
 Some village Hampden that with dauntless breast 
 The little tyrant of his fields withstood ; 
 Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest, 
 Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood 
 
THE THEORY OF STRAIN 75 
 
 Th' applause of list'ning senates to command, 
 The threats of pain and ruin to despise, 
 To scatter plenty o'er a smiling land, 
 And read their history in a nation's eyes 
 
 Their lot forbade. . . . 
 
 Some such epitaph as this might be written 
 on many a nameless grave in country church- 
 yard or urban cemetery. It was said that in the 
 Napoleonic armies every soldier carried a Field- 
 Marshal's baton in his knapsack ; and it is a fact 
 that some of the ablest of Napoleon's lieutenants 
 rose from the ranks. WhyV? Because in Re- 
 publican France the superstition of the congenital 
 inferiority of the lower classes had been tem- 
 porarily swept away by the Revolution, and 
 because the Republican tradition had been in- 
 herited by the Empire and respected by the 
 Emperor, whose own genius had raised him from 
 obscurity to supreme power, and who was on the 
 look- out for talent in the armies that he led. In 
 the British Army, where the soldiers fought 
 " under the cold shade of aristocracy," the private 
 who, had he been born in France, might have 
 become a Field-Marshal, would probably have 
 won his stripes, or at best become a subaltern, 
 and gone no further. The constitution of things 
 was against his rising to the height of his deserts. 
 " His lot forbade " his advancement. 
 
 The experiment which the Republican War 
 Ministers initiated and which Napoleon carried 
 
76 THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUL 
 
 on is of lasting interest and opens up a wide 
 vista to speculative thought. Professor Bateson 
 will perhaps contend that the Marshals who rose 
 from the ranks were plums which had " got 
 sown as wildings." But no : a Field-Marshal is, 
 in his own line, a super-plum, not a plum ; and 
 where there is one super-plum there must be 
 thousands and tens of thousands of plums. 
 In the Napoleonic armies, as in the Republican, 
 there was a temporary relaxation of a deadening 
 pressure. If that concession could enable many 
 soldiers, who would otherwise in all probability 
 have lived and died in obscurity, to rise to the 
 very highest grade of all, what might not a 
 general equalizing of conditions do in the way 
 of raising the lower classes to the mental level 
 of the upper ? This is a question which the 
 romantic stories of such men as Ney, Murat, 
 Hoche, Lannes, Junot, Augereau and others 
 compel us to ask ourselves. In our attempts to 
 answer it we can, I think, pass beyond the limits 
 of mere conjecture. The " Egeria " of my book 
 was the first to convince me that, under favour- 
 able conditions, foremost among which is an 
 attitude of trust and encouragement on the part 
 of the teacher, the village boy or girl can rival 
 the child of the upper classes in all-round mental 
 capacity in resourcefulness, in initiative, in 
 versatility, in intellectual power, in literary and 
 artistic taste. Other teachers have since taught 
 
THE THEORY OF STRAIN 77 
 
 me the same lesson. Not long after my discovery 
 of " Utopia " the head master of an elementary 
 school in the East of London showed me some 
 admirable drawings done by his pupils. I asked 
 him what proportion of his pupils could reach 
 that level. He answered : "Had you asked 
 me that question a year ago I would have said 
 ' 5 per cent,' but now I can say ' 95 per cent.' " 
 As a teacher of drawing he had recently changed 
 his aims and methods. Had he not done so, 
 he would have continued to take for granted 
 that 95 per cent of his pupils had little or no 
 capacity for drawing. More recently I was 
 shown some thirty or forty poems written by 
 girls in a higher standard elementary school in 
 one of our northern manufacturing towns. The 
 high level of feeling and expression reached in 
 these poems astonished me. 1 The head mistress 
 
 1 Here is one of the poems : 
 
 LATE OCTOBER 
 
 Patter of fitful rain, 
 
 Shiver of falling leaves, 
 
 And wail of wind which has left behind 
 
 The glory of fruit and sheaves. 
 
 Mist on the crowning hills, 
 
 Mist in the vales below, 
 
 And grief in the heart that has seen depart 
 
 Its summer of long ago. 
 
 A similar and equally successful experiment has been made 
 by Miss Ruth M. Fletcher in one of the lower forms of a Girls' 
 Municipal High School. " Original poetry by children," 
 
78 THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUL 
 
 explained to me that being in need of " copy " 
 for the school magazine, she encouraged the 
 girls to try their hands at writing verse. The 
 girls, who had long had access to a good school 
 library, containing many volumes of poetry, 
 responded with alacrity. The teacher added 
 that " our poetry is only a very small part of 
 our literature scheme, 1 the carrying out of which 
 is to the children pure joy, and these poems are 
 only first attempts." Similar discoveries of 
 latent taste and talent in the average elementary 
 school-child are constantly being made. They 
 point to serious defects in our system or systems 
 of education, which do so much for the child, 
 of whatever social grade, and leave so little to 
 his spontaneous activity, that his mind is still 
 in large measure an unexplored land. If educa- 
 tion could be reformed in the direction of setting 
 children free to develop individuality and realize 
 latent capacity, it would, I think, be found that 
 
 writes Miss Fletcher, " is an interesting subject, but space 
 forbids full discussion here. Enough to state that I have 
 experimented independently in this direction, and am amazed 
 and delighted at the result. I believe that most intelligent 
 children of this age have within them, mostly latent, a vein 
 of poetry, simple and rhythmical, and need only the right 
 stimulus to use and delight in the power." Most of Miss 
 Fletcher's pupils would be of " bullace " breed, some being 
 ex- elementary scholars and others the daughters of lower 
 middle-class parents. 
 
 1 This is quite true. The prose efforts of the children are 
 as remarkable as their poems. 
 
THE THEORY OF STRAIN 79 
 
 the mental ability of both the upper and the lower 
 classes was much greater than we had imagined 
 it to be. But it would not be found that the 
 mental ability of the upper classes was appreciably 
 greater than that of the lower. Such at least 
 is the conviction which my recent educational 
 experiences and my reinterpretation, in the light 
 which they cast, of former experiences have 
 forced upon my mind. 
 
 The idea that the upper classes are by nature 
 morally and spiritually superior to the lower is a 
 dangerous delusion, of which, for their own sakes, 
 those who belong to the upper classes would do 
 well to rid themselves. If the lower classes fill 
 more than their share of our prison cells, the reason 
 is that many of them are born into and reared 
 in criminal surroundings, that they are beset by 
 temptations to dishonesty and other forms of 
 lawlessness to which the upper classes are not 
 exposed, and that, in spite of the desire of our 
 legislators to do justice to all classes, there is 
 still one law for the rich and another for the 
 poor. * Criminality is not viciousness. The lower 
 classes may be more criminal than the upper, 
 in the sense of being more frequently convicted 
 of offences against the law, but they are certainly 
 not more vicious. If anything, they are less 
 selfish and less worldly. But this too can easily 
 be explained. The disadvantages of environment 
 
 1 See The Law and the Poor, by Judge Parry. 
 
80 THE PROBLEM OP THE SOUL 
 
 are not all on the si'de of the poor. The rich 
 are exposed to temptations from which the 
 poor are largely, if not wholly, exempt. It was 
 said of old by one who taught with authority 
 that it is easier for a camel to go through the 
 eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into 
 the Kingdom of Heaven. Did not Christ mean 
 by this that outward prosperity, with its tempta- 
 tions to self-indulgence a hydra-headed vice, 
 to worldliness, with the perversion of ideals 
 which it involves, and to arrogance, with its 
 acceptance as final of an outward standard of 
 value, is ever tending to distract the prosperous 
 from the inward life ? Bearing these things in 
 mind let us hold the scales even between the two 
 classes and say that on the moral and spiritual 
 planes neither is inherently superior to the other. 
 The present war has proved to demonstration 
 that there are vast reserves of heroism and self- 
 devotion in human nature, and that in this 
 respect the upper classes are not more richly 
 endowed than the lower, nor the lower classes 
 than the upper. One of our officers, writing 
 from the front, says of his men : "I'm not 
 emotional, but . . . since I've been out here in 
 the trenches I've had the water forced into my 
 eyes, not once, but a dozen times, from sheer 
 admiration and respect, by the action of rough 
 rude chaps whom you'd never waste a second 
 glance on in the streets of London, men who, so 
 
THE THEORY OF STRAIN 81 
 
 far from being exceptional, are typical through 
 and through, just the common street average. 
 . . . Under the strain and stress of this savage 
 existence these men show up for what they really 
 are under their rough hides ; they are jewel all 
 through . . . and the daily round of their lives 
 is simply full of little acts of self-sacrifice, 
 generosity, and unstudied heroism." And our 
 men at the front have often written in equivalent 
 terms of their officers. The truth is that, in 
 response to the stimulus of this tremendous war, 
 sublime qualities are ever awaking which exist 
 as possibilities in those hidden depths of our 
 nature where distinctions of class and breeding 
 are unknown, and which are therefore, in the real 
 meaning of the phrase, characteristic of man as 
 man. In the Kingdom of Heaven there is no 
 such thing as "strain." 
 
 Thus the " inherent and congenital " superiority 
 of the upper to the lower classes, which Professor 
 Bateson seems to postulate, resolves itself, when 
 carefully considered, into a doubtful superiority 
 in physique. When we ask the upper classes to 
 make good their claim to superiority in intellect, 
 in morals, in spirituality, the evidence which 
 they bring forward proves to be wholly incon- 
 clusive. On the higher levels of human nature 
 such phrases as well-born, high-born, well-bred, 
 good birth, good breeding, and their opposites 
 have no meaning. Or rather, so far as they 
 6 
 
82 THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUL 
 
 have a meaning, they indicate superiority or 
 inferiority in respect of inherited environment, 
 not of breed. The infinitude which is of the 
 essence of human nature is as much the birth- 
 right of the peasant or the miner as of the pluto- 
 crat or the peer. The biological theory of strain, 
 when applied to human beings, may lend its 
 countenance to those who are born into high 
 places. But that proves nothing except that, 
 like the arrogance which it seems to countenance, 
 the theory, as an interpretation of human nature, 
 is profoundly materialistic at heart. The philo- 
 sophy of life which resolves psychology into 
 biology is vitiated by one fundamental fallacy. 
 It ignores the transforming, expanding, sublimat- 
 ing power of consciousness. It ignores the soul. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE ANCESTRY OF THE SOUL 
 
 WHAT, then, does a man inherit from his lineal 
 ancestors, near or remote ? Is his heritage 
 purely physical? If "Yes" is my answer to 
 this question, I must at once modify it by remind- 
 ing myself that on this plane of existence and 
 in this life the physical and spiritual sides of 
 man's nature cannot be disjoined. There is a 
 physical side to spirituality just as there is a 
 spiritual side to physique. Expression, for ex- 
 ample, is a spiritual feature of the outer man, 
 and as such is much more within a man's control 
 than are the physical features which are trans- 
 mitted to him by his parents and other lineal 
 ancestors. A man cannot, by taking thought or 
 action, alter the shape of his nose, unless indeed 
 by his own folly he exposes it to the ravages of 
 disease ; but he can by his manner of living 
 alter and even transform his expression. It is 
 the same, mutatis mutandis, with the inner man, 
 the soul. If we think of the soul as character, 
 we see that there is a physical side to it, namely, 
 temperament. If we think of it as mentality we 
 
 83 
 
84 THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUL 
 
 see that there is a physical side to it, namely, 
 brain power. That temperament and brain power, 
 though they seem to belong to the inner man, are 
 in the main inherited (in the narrower sense of 
 the word) is, I think, as certain as that expression, 
 though it seems to belong to the outer man, is 
 not inherited, or is so only in a minor degree. 
 
 But temperament and brain power are only 
 the lines or surfaces of contact between the body 
 and the soul. What of the soul itself ? Have 
 we any evidence that character, as distinguished 
 from temperament, or that mind, as distinguished 
 from brain power, is transmissible from father 
 to son, or from ancestor to descendant ? I 
 think not. Such evidence as seems to be forth- 
 coming is found, when carefully analysed, to be 
 vitiated, either by lineal heredity having been 
 credited with influences which really emanate from 
 environment, or by temperament having been con- 
 fused with character, and brain power with mind. 
 
 On the other hand there is, I think, positive 
 evidence that the soul does not. or rather cannot, 
 descend from father to son. I have given my 
 reasons for believing that the average man has 
 practically limitless reserves of spiritual and 
 mental vitality, reserves which are not the less 
 real because he may be unable to bring more 
 than a very small part of them into action. In 
 other words, I have given my reasons for thinking 
 that on the higher levels of life our racial inherit- 
 
THE ANCESTRY OF THE SOUL 85 
 
 ance is infinite. If I am right, the question 
 which I have asked is answered. It would be as 
 reasonable to suppose that the Gulf Stream could 
 flow through a drainpipe as that the infinite 
 reserves of mental and spiritual vitality with 
 which each of us is endowed could be transmitted 
 through the medium of a speck of protoplasm. 
 What, then, is the ancestry of the soul ? We 
 are now in a region of pure conjecture. When 
 Professor Bateson tells us that " Shakespeare 
 once existed as a speck of protoplasm no bigger 
 than a pin's head," and that " to this nothing 
 was added that would not equally well have 
 served to build up a baboon or a rat," he is 
 begging a very large question. Because he is 
 an expert at biology he is claiming the right to 
 lay down the law on a matter which is so great 
 and has so many implications that " the soul of 
 the wide world " is alone competent to deal with 
 it. In doing this he is exceeding the warrant of 
 his credentials, high as these doubtless are. It 
 is possible that the statement which he makes 
 so confidently is entirely wrong. It is possible 
 that at a certain stage in the development of 
 the Shakespearean speck of protoplasm, some- 
 thing very important was added to it, namely, 
 the soul of Shakespeare. At any rate, the problem 
 which Professor Bateson solves in this off-hand 
 way infinitely transcends the province of any 
 expert ; and therefore, though no one is entitled 
 
86 THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUL 
 
 to dogmatize about it, anyone who will take the 
 trouble to think is free to consider it. 
 
 The best way to approach such a problem is 
 to examine the solutions of it that at present 
 hold the field. Of the current solutions of the 
 problem of the soul's origin there are four which 
 deserve attention : 
 
 (1) The first is the theory of the supernatural 
 creation of the soul. 
 
 (2) The second is the theory of the proto- 
 plasmic origin of the soul. 
 
 (3) The third is the theory of epigenesis, or the 
 building up of the soul by environmental in- 
 fluences. 
 
 (4) The fourth is the theory of reincarnation, 
 or the evolution of the soul through a sequence 
 of earth-lives. 
 
 (1) According to the first of these theories, 
 each soul in turn is created by the Supernatural 
 God and enters the growing organism during 
 its pre-natal life. This theory, which has the 
 sanction of Christian theology, is rigidly predesti- 
 narian in tendency ; and as, according to the 
 same theology, the destiny of the individual is 
 either eternal misery or eternal bliss, the theory 
 in question lays a heavy responsibility on him 
 whose creative will is ever peopling and re- 
 peopling the earth. Calvinism has accepted this 
 responsibility on behalf of the Creator ; but the 
 other schools of Christian thought, shrinking 
 
THE ANCESTRY OF THE SOUL 87 
 
 from the logical consequences of accepting it, 
 have tried to minimize or to evade it. I will 
 not press this objection to the orthodox theory ; 
 for my own objection to it strikes at its very 
 roots. A theory which takes for granted the 
 dualism of Nature and the Supernatural is con- 
 ceived, as it seems to me, in error. But this is a 
 point on which I do not propose to enlarge ; for 
 having elsewhere tried to show that our existing 
 disorders and discontents are largely due to our 
 having accepted supernaturalism as a philosophy 
 of the Universe, and worked it out, both in theory 
 and practice, into a philosophy of life, 1 1 feel that 
 I need not take pains to disprove this particular 
 application of the fundamental postulate of 
 supernaturalism. And even if I believed in the 
 Supernatural, I should protest, in the name of 
 logical economy, against supernatural causes 
 being invoked to account for natural phenomena 
 while the resources of natural causation were 
 still unexhausted. 
 
 (2) I will therefore pass on to the second theory. 
 If the first is spiritually predestinarian, the second 
 is physically fatalistic. In the two sentences 
 which I have quoted from Professor Bateson's 
 Address the protoplasmic theory is set forth 
 with uncompromising directness. I have given 
 my reasons for rejecting this theory. Posing as 
 
 i See, in particular, The Creed of Buddha, Chap. VIII, and 
 What Is and What Might Be, Chap. I 
 
88 THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUL 
 
 a reasoned conclusion it resolves itself into the 
 assumption that the " significance " of " nature " 
 (lineal heredity) as a factor in human develop- 
 ment is " overwhelmingly greater " than that of 
 " nurture " (environment). This assumption 
 resolves itself into another, namely, that the laws 
 of the plant and animal worlds govern human 
 life, govern it so rigorously that the solution of 
 psychological problems rests with biology, not 
 with psychology. The positive evidence for the 
 " overwhelmingly greater significance of nature " 
 is not merely inconclusive, but actually admits 
 of being so interpreted as to point in the opposite 
 direction ; for again and again we find that 
 traits and tendencies which are supposed to be 
 " inherited " are really due to the racial or 
 generic nature of man, which seems to be in- 
 finitely adaptable and resourceful, reacting to 
 the stimulus of an infinitely comprehensive and 
 variable environment. But my chief objection 
 to the protoplasmic theory is that in the act of 
 accounting for the soul it abolishes it. For in 
 order to pass the soul through the narrow channel 
 of a " speck of protoplasm " it must needs deprive 
 it of its infinitude ; and to deprive it of its 
 infinitude is to destroy its identity ; for conscious- 
 ness, which differentiates man from all other 
 living things, is the very principle of infinitude 
 in his life. If the soul is nothing more than a 
 function of the body, the protoplasmic theory 
 
THE ANCESTRY OF THE SOUL 89 
 
 of its origin is obviously correct. But in that 
 case the soul is non-existent ; and the body, 
 with its powers and functions, is the whole man. 
 If Shakespeare once existed as a speck of proto- 
 plasm, and if to this nothing was added that 
 would not equally well have served to build up 
 a baboon or a rat, then the soul of Shakespeare 
 was no more of a reality than the soul of a baboon 
 or a rat. 1 What then ? Will this biological 
 solution of the master problem of psychology 
 permanently content the biologist ? No : he is 
 no " vitalist," and sooner or later, constrained 
 by the logic of his own conceptions, he will either 
 have to abandon the protoplasmic theory as 
 inadequate or allow a mechanical solution of the 
 same problem to take its place. Life, as the 
 biologist who resolves psychology into biology 
 conceives it, is bound in the iron fetters of neces- 
 sity. The constraining forces of heredity, acting 
 through the speck of protoplasm, are irresistible. 
 The biologist will probably admit that a man 
 can modify his environment and to that extent 
 react on his destiny ; but this concession will 
 do nothing to lift the cloud of physical fatalism 
 with which his theory of the soul overshadows 
 man's life. For the power of modifying environ- 
 ment is as much inherent in the speck of proto- 
 
 1 I mean by this that it belonged to the same order of 
 reality (or unreality). The difference between it and the soul 
 of the baboon or the rat was a difference of degree, not of kind. 
 
90 THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUL 
 
 plasm which will become a man as any other 
 of its constituent elements ; and when reaction 
 on destiny is itself predestined, it is an illusion 
 to feel that one is free. 
 
 (3) The third theory is at once contradictory 
 of and complementary to the second. The basis 
 of it is recognition, by another school of biologists, 
 of the fact that " nurture is inconceivably more 
 important than nature." It has been expounded 
 by Dr. Chalmers Mitchell in his instructive book 
 Evolution and the War. Dr. Chalmers Mitchell 
 is dealing with the causes of national differentia- 
 tion ; but his arguments apply with equal force 
 to the causes of individual differentiation. His 
 criticism of Mendelian assumptions is outspoken 
 and direct. He considers that Professor Bate- 
 son's " bold pronouncements " in Australia have 
 " opened the flood-gates to dogmatic quackery." 
 And when Professor Bateson tells his audience 
 that " with little hesitation we can now declare 
 that the potentialities and aptitudes, physical 
 as well as mental, sex, colours, powers of work 
 or of invention, liability to diseases, possible 
 duration of life, and the other features by which 
 the members of a mixed population differ from 
 each other, are determined from the moment of 
 fertilization " his critic observes that for the 
 inclusion of " mental potentialities and aptitudes 
 in such a generalization . . . there is no scrap 
 of positive evidence." He adds that " there is 
 
THE ANCESTRY OF THE SOUL 91 
 
 nothing but theory to support the proposition 
 that in the case of man nature 'has an over- 
 whelmingly greater significance ' than nurture." 
 What makes this criticism the more significant 
 is that Dr. Chalmers Mitchell's own standpoint 
 is strictly physiological. It is true that he lays 
 great stress on the part that consciousness and 
 the sense of freedom play in human life ; but 
 though he deprecates Bergson's attempt " to 
 associate consciousness and the sense of freedom 
 not merely with human life but with all life," 
 and though he holds that " consciousness and 
 freedom, purpose and intelligence," are not " to 
 be ascribed to lowly animals," he yet believes 
 " with Darwin, that as the body of man has been 
 evolved from the body of animals, so the in- 
 tellectual, emotional, and moral faculties of man 
 have been evolved from the qualities of animals." 
 Nor does he " shrink from the implications even 
 of the phrase that thought is a secretion of the 
 brain as bile is a secretion of the liver." How, 
 then, has the soul of man, as he reads its history, 
 been evolved ? " By the moulding pressure of 
 environment," is his answer to this question. 
 In his opinion " the most important of the mould- 
 ing forces that produce the differences in nation- 
 ality are epigenetic, that is to say, they are 
 imposed on the hereditary material and have to 
 be reimposed on each generation." And what 
 is true of the differences in nationality is true of 
 
92 THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUL 
 
 the differences in individuality. "It is after 
 the Miltonoplasm (the germ of the future Milton) 
 has grown into a sentient human being that the 
 factors most potent in shaping the direction, 
 quality, and value of his mental and emotional 
 output come into operation. These factors are 
 in his environment, not in himself : they are 
 products of the ' Kultur ' of the nation in which 
 he lives, and they, at least, are created by human 
 will and are subject to human will." So far as 
 " these epigenetic agencies . . . acting on the 
 mind and emotions " are concerned, " the mind 
 and the body of the infant are neutral, clean 
 sheets on which many kinds of writing may be 
 impressed." From these passages I gather that the 
 epigenesists transfer activity from the organism 
 to the environment, and substitute for the phy- 
 siological conception of the organism reacting 
 to the environment, the more mechanical con- 
 ception of the environment moulding the 
 organism, moulding its " mind and emotions " 
 as well as its body. But whence does the environ- 
 ment derive its plastic force ? The answer to 
 this question is a startling paradox. " The 
 factors most potent in shaping the direction, 
 quality, and value of" a man's "mental and 
 emotional output . . . are created by human will 
 and are subject to human will." How can this 
 be ? How can the environment derive its plastic 
 force from the victim of its own plastic pressure ? 
 
THE ANCESTRY OF THE SOUL 93 
 
 How can a " neutral clean sheet " develop into a 
 " creative will " ? To cover a sheet of paper 
 with script will not, as far as I can see, give it 
 the power of creating the writer's pen and ink, 
 not to speak of his right hand, his mind, and his 
 will. Dr. Chalmers Mitchell " asserts as a 
 biological fact, that the moral law is as real and 
 as external to man as the starry vault." If this is 
 so, how can it be said that " its creation and 
 sustenance are the crowning glory of man." To 
 criticize in detail a theory which entangles itself 
 in such paradoxes would be a waste of time. 
 The objections to it are at once fundamental 
 and obvious. Until Dr. Chalmers Mitchell can 
 explain to us how the transition, in the life of 
 man, from absolute passivity to the highest 
 conceivable form of activity is effected, I must 
 be allowed to hold that the epigenetic, like the 
 protoplasmic theory of the soul, has failed to 
 make good. 
 
 (4) When experts flatly contradict one another 
 on matters of vital importance, the amateur 
 instinctively assumes that the truth lies between 
 them, that both are right and both wrong, and 
 that what is needed is a larger and more com- 
 prehensive conception, belonging perhaps to a 
 higher level of thought, by which their respective 
 theories will be alternately justified and con- 
 demned. The protoplasmic and the epigenetic 
 theories of the soul embody the attempts of 
 
94 THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUL 
 
 scientific experts to solve the central problem 
 of psychology in terms of biological concepts. So 
 far as I know, these are the only biological theories 
 of the soul that hold the field ; and as they cancel 
 one another, I am driven to conclude that biology 
 cannot do the work of psychology, that the soul 
 must be accepted on its own evidence, and that 
 all attempts to account for it on physiological 
 grounds must be abandoned as futile. 
 
 Now to accept the soul on its own evidence is 
 to accept without reserve the revelation of the 
 growing and deepening light of consciousness. 
 For what is essential in the outgrowth of con- 
 sciousness is that an inward source of light is 
 bearing witness to itself in the world-revealing 
 rays which it casts, just as the dawning sun 
 reveals the treasures and wonders of earth and 
 in doing so bears witness to itself. That in- 
 ward source of light is what we call the soul or 
 self. As the soul becomes aware of itself and 
 begins to distinguish between itself and the 
 world which it looks out upon, in the very act of 
 guaranteeing a dependent reality to the latter, it 
 claims intrinsic reality for itself. Recognition of 
 the validity of this claim is the basic assumption 
 of psychology ; and if we reject the rival theories 
 of the biologists, we must make this assumption 
 our starting-point in our quest of the true theory 
 of the soul. 
 Can we do otherwise ? If consciousness, with 
 
THE ANCESTRY OF THE SOUL 95 
 
 the sense of freedom which accompanies it, is, 
 as Dr. Chalmers Mitchell contends, " the centre 
 from which all science, all philosophy, all emotion, 
 must set out in exploration of the universe and 
 to which they must all return " ; if it " transforms 
 all the qualities and faculties acquired by human 
 beings from the animal world and is the foundation 
 of free and intelligent existence " ; if it " puts 
 man and the nations he makes above the laws 
 of the unconscious world " ; if it " gives man the 
 power of being at once the actor, the spectator, 
 and the critic " ; if it " enables him to distinguish 
 between self and not self " ; if it " brings with 
 it the sense of responsibility and reality," if 
 consciousness is all this, and does all these things, 
 and if all attempts to account for it on physio- 
 logical grounds are, as Dr. Chalmers Mitchell 
 insists, disastrous failures (his own attempt being 
 tantamount to a confession that the mystery of 
 its origin is impenetrable), what course is open 
 to us but to accept its explanation of itself? 
 Now what consciousness tells us about itself is 
 that its subject, that which is conscious the 
 soul, as we call it is not merely as real as the 
 outward world to which its body or outward 
 self belongs, but has a higher kind of reality 
 which it the soul is alone competent to in- 
 vestigate and value. 
 
 There shines no light save its own light to show 
 Itself unto itself. 
 
96 THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUL 
 
 Let us now go back to the protoplasmic and the 
 epigenetic theories, and, assuming that the truth 
 lies between these, let us ask ourselves how far 
 each is right, and how far wrong. The proto- 
 plasmists are right when they affirm that the 
 future man is in the human embryo ; but they 
 are wrong when they identify the human embryo 
 with the fertilized germ-cell ; for in so doing 
 they bring the higher developments of human 
 life under the control of physical necessity, and 
 thereby limit unduly the possibilities of the 
 future man, de-spiritualizing his spiritual life, 
 lowering him to the animal level of existence, 
 and ignoring or at best minimizing his power of 
 transforming himself by reacting to the stimulus 
 of environment. The epigenesists are right when 
 they insist that the " possession of consciousness 
 and the sense of freedom is a vital and over- 
 mastering distinction between man and beast " ; 
 they are right when they affirm that the possi- 
 bilities of human development, under the trans- 
 forming influence of consciousness and in response 
 to the stimulus of environment, are practically 
 boundless, even within the limits of each in- 
 dividual life ; they are right when they contend 
 that the differences between man and man, as 
 between nation and nation, are largely environ- 
 mental, not congenital ; but they are wrong 
 when they ascribe quasi-creative activity to the 
 environment and mere passivity and receptive- 
 
THE ANCESTRY OF THE SOUL 97 
 
 ness to the human organism, and they complicate 
 their error and make nonsense of their philosophy 
 when they go on to speak of the environment as 
 the product of man's creative will. 
 
 What we need, then, is a theory of the soul, 
 which will hold, with the protoplasmists, that 
 growth is always achieved by reaction to the 
 stimulus of environment, not by passive accept- 
 ance of its " moulding " pressure ; and yet will 
 hold, with the epigenesists, that in each individual 
 life the possibilities of development, in response 
 to the influence of environment, are infinitely 
 great ; a theory which will affirm that each 
 human embryo the embryo of the future serf 
 not less than that of the future emperor, the 
 embryo of the future fool not less than that of the 
 future philosopher, the embryo of the future felon 
 not less than that of the future saint is a com- 
 plex of limitless possibilities, mental, moral, and 
 spiritual, as well as physical ; which will affirm, 
 in other words, that the racial or characteristically 
 human element in the new-born infant enormously 
 outweighs the lineal or physically inherited 
 element, and that therefore, instead of being at 
 the mercy of the tendencies which are inherent 
 in his own " blood," each human being is free 
 (apart from the disabilities which may be imposed 
 upon him by the particular environment into 
 which he is born) to range at will through the 
 world which consciousness opens to him, and to 
 7 
 
98 THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUL 
 
 develop himself in response to its manifold 
 influences by drawing upon the reserves of 
 potentiality that surge up, when called upon to 
 energize, out of the inexhaustible fountain of his 
 " soul." 
 
 Such a theory has long been familiar to the 
 exoteric as well as the esoteric thought of the 
 Par East. According to the doctrine of Rein- 
 carnation, the individual soul has not been 
 supernaturally created, has not entered the world 
 in a speck of protoplasm, has not been built up 
 by the moulding pressure of a particular environ- 
 ment, but has descended from an obscure and 
 infinitely distant source along the line of its 
 own continuous existence, bringing with it into 
 each new earth-life a heritage bequeathed to it 
 by its own former selves, and leaving behind it 
 at the end of each earth-life the same heritage 
 but enriched or impoverished by the part that it 
 has played on earth for transmission to its 
 own future selves. This theory accepts the soul 
 on its own valuation, and, recognizing its potential 
 infinitude, allows it, not years but aeons for the 
 work of self-realization, thereby substituting for 
 the idea of the soul being inherited from one's 
 lineal ancestors, the idea of the soul inheriting 
 from itself. 
 
 That we may the better discern the trend of this 
 theory, let us contrast it with the protoplasmic, 
 with which, as it happens, it has most in common, 
 
THE ANCESTRY OF THE SOUL 99 
 
 but to which it is also most directly opposed. 
 We have seen that on the physical plane of his 
 being a man inherits, lineally, from his own line 
 of ancestors, racially, from the whole human race ; 
 his racial inheritance being transmitted to him 
 through the channel of lineal heredity, and 
 modified stamped with the birth-mark of in- 
 dividuality -in transmission. " It is exactly 
 the same," says the protoplasmist, " on the higher 
 planes of man's being." "It is the same," says 
 the believer in reincarnation, " but with a 
 difference." On the higher, as on the lower 
 planes, the distinction between lineal and racial 
 heredity holds good, and a man's racial inheritance 
 is transmitted to him through the channel of 
 lineal heredity, and modified stamped with the 
 birth-mark of individuality in transmission ; but 
 on the higher planes a man inherits, racially, not 
 from the human race only, but from the fountain 
 of all soul-life, and lineally, not from his own 
 line of ancestors, but from the line of his own 
 former selves. 
 
 There are difficulties in the way of accepting 
 this theory, which I do not seek to minimize. 
 The conception of the soul as super-physical does 
 not readily harmonize with our instinctive 
 assumption that the physical plane is the only 
 plane of natural existence, that the world is in 
 itself what it seems to be to our normal perceptive 
 faculties, that the limitations of our bodily senses 
 
100 THE PEOBLEM OF THE SOUL 
 
 determine the boundaries of the Universe. But 
 this assumption, with the fatal contraction of 
 the idea of Nature which it involves, is a mere 
 superstition, and, as an argument against the 
 theory of reincarnation, carries no weight. 
 The failure of biology to do the work of psychology 
 compels us to accept the soul on its own evidence ; 
 and when once we have taken this step, we must 
 not shrink from its consequences, however 
 irreconcilable these may be with the unformu- 
 lated axioms of popular thought. 
 
 For my own part, I feel in my heart of hearts 
 that the theory of reincarnation holds the key 
 to the riddle of man's existence ; but how the 
 key works I cannot pretend to explain in full. 
 In postulating a plane of being which is at once 
 natural and super-physical, the theory leads us 
 into a world of mystery in which the mind is 
 not at home and cannot expect to find its way. 
 Any attempt that I might make to work out 
 the philosophy of reincarnation would be largely 
 imaginative, and would therefore reflect my own 
 personality and lead at last, in the event of con- 
 troversy, to the logical impasse which Cardinal 
 Newman indicated when he reminded us that 
 where there is no common measure of minds there 
 can be no common measure of arguments. I 
 will therefore content myself with pointing out 
 that the doctrine of reincarnation accepts and 
 even insists upon the fundamental truths which 
 
THE ANCESTRY OF THE SOUL 101 
 
 the two biological theories of the soul respectively 
 postulate, but to which, owing to their refusing 
 to entertain the hypothesis of the super-physical, 
 they do less than justice. The first of these is 
 that the future man is in the human embryo, 
 whatever that may be. The second is that 
 consciousness, with the sense of freedom which 
 accompanies it, is the differential feature of the 
 growing man, and that the transforming influence 
 of consciousness on human life is unlimited. 
 If we accept the former conception, while rejecting 
 the hypothesis of the super-physical, we must, 
 with Professor Bateson, identify the human 
 embryo with the fertilized germ-cell ; but in 
 that case, if we accept the second conception, 
 we are faced by the difficulty which the theory 
 of epigenesis seeks to evade that inasmuch 
 as consciousness is the Protean principle in man's 
 being, the principle of limitless transformation, 
 it cannot itself come under the control of physical 
 necessity, and therefore that the subject of 
 consciousness that which is becoming aware 
 of itself cannot pass through the narrow channel 
 of physical generation and lineal heredity. Ac- 
 cording to the doctrine of reincarnation, the 
 future man, with all his possibilities, up to the 
 / last term of ideal perfection, is in the human 
 embryo ; but as consciousness is the differential 
 feature of his being, until the subject of conscious- 
 ness has united itself with his growing body, the 
 
102 THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUL 
 
 human embryo, as distinguished from the embryo 
 of the human body, has not been formed. When 
 that union has taken place, the human embryo 
 the new-born infant is ready to start on its 
 career of self-realization ; but it is no " neutral 
 clean sheet " waiting for " writing to be im- 
 pressed " on it by its environment, but a living 
 organism, with limitless reserves of potentiality, 
 which it is ready to realize, not by passive accept- 
 ance of the impress of environment, but by active 
 reaction to its stimulus. 
 
 Thus the doctrine of reincarnation, while 
 bringing the life of man in its totality under the 
 master law of growth, withdraws the life of the 
 soul from bondage to the laws of physical growth. 
 In other words, it recognizes two kinds of heredity 
 the heredity of the body, which inherits from 
 the man's lineal ancestors, and the heredity of 
 the soul, which inherits from its own former 
 selves. 
 
 This conception throws light on many problems. 
 In particular, it composes the quarrel between 
 heredity and environment, for it enables us to 
 see that there is no such quarrel. When Pro- 
 fessor Bateson affirms that " nature . . . has an 
 overwhelmingly greater significance " than 
 " nurture," he is as wide of the mark as is Dr. 
 Chalmers Mitchell when he affirms that " nurture 
 is inconceivably more important than nature." 
 On the higher, as on the lower, levels of man's 
 
THE ANCESTRY OF THE SOUL 103 
 
 being, nature and nurture, heredity and environ- 
 ment, are in very truth the warp and the woof 
 of the tissue of his life. As a controlling factor 
 in human development, heredity counts for no 
 more than environment ; and environment counts 
 for no more than heredity. Each in turn counts 
 for everything ; but neither counts for any- 
 thing apart from the other. Each postulates 
 the other. Each is complementary to the other. 
 Each measures the other. But only because 
 each is infinite. The nascent soul is a complex 
 of infinite possibilities. It realizes, or begins 
 to realize, these by reacting to the stimulus of 
 an infinitely wide and infinitely changeful environ- 
 ment. Apart from such an environment, its 
 possibilities would remain as dormant as those 
 which are wrapped up in a grain of mummy 
 wheat. If its heredity were physical and limited, 
 its power of reacting to environment would be 
 strictly limited, and the limits of its activity 
 would be strictly predetermined ; and we should 
 then have to admit, not that nature counted 
 for more than nurture in the life of the soul, but 
 that necessity counted for everything and freedom 
 for nothing. But in that case there would be 
 no soul. The physical side of man's being would 
 be the only side. When we spoke of the soul, of 
 consciousness, of freedom, of spirituality, we 
 should be cheating ourselves with empty words, 
 doctrine of reincarnation, by its conception 
 
104 THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUL 
 
 of super-physical heredity, delivers us from 
 these pessimistic conclusions. For it opens down 
 the ages an ample channel for the journeying soul, 
 and so allows it in each successive earth-life to 
 take up anew the task of self-development, ready 
 to measure, with the infinitude of its inherited 
 potentialities, the infinitude of the environing 
 world. In fine, in the doctrine of reincarnation 
 we have the only theory of the origin of the 
 individual man, which, without invoking the 
 Supernatural, safeguards the soul. 
 
 It is possible that some persons have attained 
 to certitude in these matters. If there are such 
 persons they are in a more advanced stage of 
 mental and psychical development than I am, 
 and truth, for them, means something wider and 
 deeper, something more absorbing and constrain- 
 ing, than it means for me. For both these 
 reasons they, of all people, would be the last to 
 wish me to accept their teaching until I could 
 see for myself that it was true. For when we 
 are dealing with the master problems of life, the 
 dogmatic attitude, with its implied assumption 
 that truth is a thing to possess rather than to 
 be possessed by, is symptomatic, not of certitude, 
 but of secret self-distrust. None are so tolerant 
 or so unwilling to proselytize as those who really 
 know. I am not of the brotherhood of those 
 who really know, but I am not wholly blind to 
 
THE ANCESTRY OF THE SOUL 105 
 
 my own limitations. And so, speaking as an 
 ordinary man to ordinary men, I repeat what I 
 said at the beginning of this chapter that when 
 we are considering the origin of the soul we are 
 in a region of pure conjecture, in which anyone 
 with a spirit of adventure is free to theorize, but 
 in which no one may count himself to have appre- 
 hended. My spirit of adventure has led me to 
 examine the four theories of the origin of the 
 soul which seem at present to hold the field ; and 
 I have now satisfied myself that the most illumi- 
 nating of these and the least open to destructive 
 criticism is the theory of a reincarnating and 
 self-developing soul or ego, with which the Far 
 East has been familiar for thousands of years. 1 
 Further than this I have not gone and have no 
 wish to go. 
 
 1 The theory of reincarnation does not solve the problem 
 of the soul's origin. Indeed it is the only one of the four 
 theories which does not pretend to do so. What it does is to 
 throw back the dawn of the soul'slife into so dark and remote 
 a past that the problem of the development of the soul takes 
 the place in our minds of the problem of its origin. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE RANGE OF THE SOUL 
 
 THERE is a principle of infinitude in man which 
 we call consciousness. We mean by conscious- 
 ness the dawn of its own light on the soul. There- 
 fore the real principle of infinitude in man's life 
 is the soul itself. I have tried to prove that 
 each of us has limitless potentialities waiting to be 
 realized, limitless reserves of mental and spiritual 
 vitality waiting to be mobilized. This is one 
 aspect of the infinitude of the soul. Is it possible 
 to advance from this somewhat negative con- 
 ception of infinitude to a more positive con- 
 ception ? I think it is. 
 
 Let us look at the matter from a somewhat 
 different point of view. Let us start with con- 
 sciousness of self. In the act of being conscious 
 of my self I am conscious of the permanent and 
 / inherent unity of my self, but I am not conscious 
 of its limits. I cannot define its boundaries in 
 any way. I know that it is intimately connected 
 with what I call my body, and that it can make 
 the weal or woe of the body its own. But I also 
 
 106 
 
THE EANGE OF THE SOUL 107 
 
 know that it can identify itself with things which 
 seem either to be outside itself or to include 
 itself, and that it can make their weal or woe its 
 own. For example, I can identify myself with 
 my family, with my clan, with my city, with 
 my country, with the whole brotherhood of 
 humanity. I can also identify myself with my 
 school, my university, my profession, my guild 
 or trade union, my political party, my church 
 or religious sect. I can even identify myself 
 with impersonal causes of various kinds, such as 
 the reform of education, the reform of social 
 conditions, the pursuit of beauty or truth. In 
 each of these cases I feel a sense of proprietorship 
 in the community with which I identify myself. 
 I am proud of its achievements as if they were 
 my own. I take shame to myself for its failures. 
 I sympathize with its troubles and sorrows. 
 
 But looking around me I see that some persons 
 have what I may call narrower selves than others, 
 that they do not readily identify themselves with 
 the communities to which they belong, or the 
 causes that might be expected to appeal to them ; 
 that the communal spirit is wanting in them or is 
 only developed so far as it may serve their own 
 selfish ends ; that they are wrapped up in their 
 own bodily well-being and their own material 
 pursuits and possessions. On the other hand, I 
 see that there are many persons whose capacity 
 for losing themselves in communal interests and 
 
108 THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUL 
 
 impersonal causes I can but envy and revere. 
 Again, looking back to my own earlier life I see 
 that the range of my self is much wider now 
 than it was then, that I have more and larger 
 interests, that my power of identifying myself 
 with other persons and other things has gained 
 to an appreciable extent. From these facts I 
 argue that the self varies, as regards the actual 
 range of its life, from person to person, and that 
 it is capable of growing and expanding, of widen- 
 ing the sphere of its sympathies and interests, 
 within the limits of each individual life. And 
 this expansion in the range of the self is not 
 accompanied by any diminution of what I may 
 call the vividness of its consciousness. On the 
 contrary, as the self widens, its consciousness 
 seems to grow more vivid and more alert. 
 
 The question now arises : Are there any limits 
 to this process of expansion ? Is there any a 
 priori reason why the self the soul, as we may 
 now call it should not be able to identify itself 
 with the widest of all communities, whatever 
 that may be ? I know of no such reason. The 
 life of the community is the same, ideally if not 
 actually, for all the members of the community, 
 each of whom can, if he pleases, identify his 
 individual life with the common life. And how- 
 ever wide the community may be, this law holds 
 good. The fact that I am an ardent patriot, 
 that I identify my self its pains and pleasures, 
 
THE RANGE OF THE SOUL 109 
 
 its hopes and fears, its aims and interests 
 with my country, does not prevent millions of 
 other persons from doing exactly the same. Nor 
 is there any a priori reason why each member of 
 the human family should not develop a sense of 
 oneness with all his kind. Now the widest of all 
 communities wider even than the Kingdom of 
 Man is the Kingdom of God, the Universe itself. 
 In what relation does each of us stand to this 
 all-embracing unity ? The universal life is one 
 and indivisible. We cannot, for example, draw 
 a hard and fast line between the spiritual and 
 the physical life of man, or between the life of 
 man and the lives of other living things. And 
 this universal life, in its undivided totality, 
 ranging between the poles of physical energy 
 and ideal spirituality, and having one may well 
 believe inner and innermost lives of its own, 
 is what we mean when we speak of the soul of the 
 Universe. But the One Life takes innumerable 
 outward forms ; and in each of these cases of 
 self-manifestation it is, as a rule, content to move 
 in a narrow channel, walled in by habit and 
 instinct, untroubled by any message from the 
 infinite sea. But when the One Life enters the 
 channel of man's existence, there comes a pro- 
 found and far-reaching change. The lesser life 
 begins to be aware faintly and dimly at first, 
 then by degrees more and more clearly of its 
 oneness with the larger life. This growing sense 
 
110 THE PROBLEM OP THE SOUL 
 
 of awareness is the dawn of consciousness. Of 
 the transforming influence of consciousness on 
 human life I have already spoken. It reveals 
 to man a universe outside himself, and a universe 
 within himself, and it suggests that these two 
 are ultimately one. Also, since perception of 
 the infinite is of its essence, it tends to raise 
 to infinity all man's powers and tendencies. I 
 have asked if there are any limits to this process 
 of self-expansion, any limitations to the capacity 
 which is inherent in each of us, for going outside 
 himself into a communal life. Consciousness, 
 with its message from the universal to the in- 
 dividual life, is the abiding answer to this question. 
 The expansion of the self will not cease till the 
 individual soul has fully responded to the appeal 
 of the widest of all communities the universal 
 life. 
 
 We now begin to see the meaning, for man, of 
 the process of self-realization or growth. What 
 the oak-tree is to the acorn, that the universal 
 life, the soul of the Universe, is to the human 
 embryo. The purpose of the process of growth 
 is to enable the individual to draw up into him- 
 self and convert into himself the infinite life 
 which underlies his own. And the goal of this 
 process is the consciously realized identity of 
 the individual of each of a billion individuals 
 with the universal soul. Till that goal has been 
 reached the process of growth is incomplete, the 
 
THE RANGE OF THE SOUL 111 
 
 true self has not been found. When the goal 
 has been reached the individual has fulfilled his 
 destiny. For, in realizing, fully and finally, his 
 oneness with the universal life, he has entered 
 into complete possession of his racial inheritance, 
 which has expanded, while he was making good 
 his claim to it, to cosmic dimensions ; he has 
 grown to the fulness of his predestined stature ; 
 and he is at last free to say " I am I." 
 
 But is his stature predestined ? Is he growing, 
 as other living things are growing, to a predeter- 
 mined form ? I asked myself this question at 
 the beginning of this work, and since I asked it 
 I have been trying to clear the ground for my 
 answer to it. It is possible that the whole course 
 of cosmic life has been predetermined. It is 
 even conceivable that the whole drama of the 
 Universe, as it unfolds itself for us, is but the 
 self-realization of a seed which has fallen from 
 a parent tree. But if we are to apply the word 
 " predetermined " to such movements as these, 
 we must remind ourselves at the outset that we 
 are using the word in a sense other than that 
 which it ordinarily bears. When we say that 
 a movement which is infinite in all its dimensions 
 has been predetermined, we are obviously 
 subordinating the idea of totality to that of 
 development, and the idea of eternity, which is 
 the temporal aspect of totality, to that of time ; 
 
112 THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUL 
 
 and this means that words are failing us, as 
 indeed they are bound to do when we try to bring 
 to the birth conceptions which exceed the compass 
 of our thought. 
 
 But what of the individual life ? We may well 
 believe that this has its appropriate place in what 
 I have called the drama of the Universe, and we 
 may therefore say, if we please, that it has been 
 predetermined by an Infinite Will. But here, 
 too, the word " predetermined " will do less 
 than justice to the idea that we are struggling 
 to express. For what is central in the evolu- 
 tion of the individual life is the dawn of conscious- 
 ness ; and consciousness is on the one hand 
 the principle of infinitude in man's being, and 
 is on the other hand accompanied, as it dawns 
 upon us, by the growing sense of freedom, the 
 sense of being able to choose among competing 
 courses of action. Now what is predetermined, 
 in the accepted sense of the word, is both subject 
 to and limited by the stress of what we call 
 necessity ; and as the idea of freedom is anti- 
 thetical to that of necessity, it is clear that to 
 speak of the growth of the individual soul as 
 predetermined is to predicate limitation and 
 subjection to necessity of what is ideally, and 
 therefore essentially, limitless and free. 
 
 Let us say, then, in answer to the question 
 which I have asked myself, that, though the 
 general idea of the destiny of the soul being pre- 
 
THE RANGE OF THE SOUL 113 
 
 determined will always haunt us, the growth of 
 the individual soul is not predetermined, as we, 
 with our experiences of purposing, planning, and 
 executing, understand that word ; that on the 
 contrary, as each of us has infinite resources 
 outside himself to draw upon and infinite 
 potentialities within himself to realize, so he is 
 free to use these or to misuse them, and in doing 
 so to help or to hinder the process of his growth. 
 And if his freedom is at first a mere possibility, 
 he can sustain himself with the thought that 
 freedom, like every other human power and 
 prerogative, grows by being exercised ; that 
 the nearer he approaches to oneness with the 
 One Life which, being universal, is presumably 
 self-determined the freer he becomes from that 
 constraining pressure from without which we 
 call necessity ; and that when, if ever, he realizes 
 his gublime destiny, he will have united himself 
 with the fountain-head of all destiny and will 
 therefore have worked out to its last act a drama 
 which, if predetermined in any sense of that 
 word, was predetermined by his own ideal self. 
 This is but a tentative and provisional treat- 
 ment of one of the greatest of all problems. If the 
 growth of the human spirit is indeed accompanied 
 by the outgrowth of freedom, and if growth is 
 indeed the realization of potentiality and therefore 
 the fulfilment of destiny, we are up against a 
 tremendous practical paradox. By fulfilling his 
 8 
 
114 THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUL 
 
 destiny man acquires the power of mastering 
 destiny. By yielding to an irresistible pressure 
 he becomes free either to resist that pressure or 
 to intensify it. By growing blindly, helplessly, 
 instinctively he wins the right to direct and 
 control the process of his growth. How can 
 these things be ? How can self-determination 
 be predetermined ? How can the very stress 
 of necessity set its victim free ? In the last sen- 
 tence of the foregoing paragraph I have perhaps 
 indicated the direction in which the explanation 
 of this mystery is to be sought. For I have 
 suggested that man's destiny is to become one 
 with the fountain-head of all destiny and that 
 the drama of his evolution has therefore been 
 predetermined by his own ideal self. But to 
 work out this solution of the problem, to work 
 out the idea that spiritual necessity, compulsion 
 from within, is freedom, would involve a re-treat- 
 ment of the whole subject and would carry me far 
 beyond the scope of this work. 
 
 We can, however, now answer the question, or 
 at least give an answer to the question, which 
 started us on our present adventure. We asked 
 ourselves what limits, if any, there were to the 
 transforming influence of education. Ideally 
 there are no limits. Two universes are at the 
 service of those who educate the universe of 
 the environing world and the universe of the 
 child's unrealized self. Through their control 
 
THE RANGE OF THE SOUL 115 
 
 of the former universe and through their personal 
 influence they can stimulate the latter universe 
 into limitless activity and so work changes in 
 character and mentality which an outsider might 
 well regard as miraculous. There are teachers 
 in this country who have wrought such miracles, 
 not once, but many times. That they have been 
 able to work them is due to their insight into the 
 laws of human nature and their readiness to co- 
 operate with its tendencies ; and their miracles 
 are therefore in no sense miraculous. On the 
 contrary, their type of education is as near to the 
 intrinsic realities of Nature as the normal type, 
 which paralyzes natural activity and arrests 
 natural growth, is far from them. 
 
 This conclusion lays immense responsibilities 
 on the teacher ; but her responsibilities will always 
 be matched by her opportunities and should 
 therefore be counted as a privilege, not a burden. 
 The evolution of soul-life seems to be the purpose 
 of the Universe. If it is, the executants of that 
 purpose are the real rulers of the world. 
 
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