universe subservient to Him as a pliable instrument in His hands;--seeing himself everywhere and none else anywhere, endued with Bliss infinite and unalloyed, transcending all limitations of time and space. Such, briefly, is the end which man has to attain, and which, of course, is worth attaining.

3. Now, if we compare man just emerging from a state of nature and in whom manas just begins to function, with a man who belongs to one of the most civilized races now inhabiting the globe, the difference in mental development will be found strikingly great, so great indeed that, but for the similarity in the structure of the body, they may belong to two different species altogether. The rate of progress in this line of evolution seems to be very slow. The various faculties which go to form the main stock of innate capacities of a civilized man have been developed slowly one after another in successive races. It takes, indeed, a very very long time for a faculty to develop from its germinal stage even to that stage of perfection which it has reached in man at present. In fact we are told that this mental development has gone on concurrently with the racial development for ages and ages. Though each race has a development of its own as a whole, yet any given race is made up of individuals whose progress varies very widely between two extreme points. Considering the little progress made by an individual Ego in a

savage or a half-savage tribe by way of acquiring a new faculty or even a further development, to any appreciable extent, of an already existing faculty,--as distinguished from the matter comprehended by that faculty,--one finds it hard to believe that all the faculties that an Ego, taking birth in a family of the most civilised race, manifests on attaining to a certain age have been developed in a few past incarnations just preceding the present, and much less so in the present birth alone. Moreover, the different stages of progress in mental and moral development reached by different individuals, as well as the different rates of progress made by different individuals placed under the same circumstances, point, beyond all reasonable doubt, to the fact of each individual Ego having an evolution of his own which has been going on through many lives in the past, bringing with him into each birth faculties already developed to a certain stage and ready to pace a few more steps forward in that incarnation. It may even be noted that, in the early years of any particular birth, the individual man rapidly goes through the whole process of past human evolution till that point of progress is reached whence he has to continue the slow process of further development.

4. When the Ego has reached a certain stage of growth, no further advance can be effected