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And the normal rule certainly must be that the very first step in the direction of the higher initiation undertaken in that life, whichever it may be, of the long chain in which the person concerned first comprehends the matter intellectually, and sets himself to desire and earnestly to aim at the attainment of the higher spiritual wisdom, will have to deal with intellectual study and thought, directed to the problem in hand. The would-be candidate for psychic evolution of the kind which may anticipate that higher evolution which alone can truly be called spiritual, must set himself to understand and appreciate the nature of the task on which he will be engaged, and the attributes, so far as these can be ascertained by any testimony open to him, of those who control the resources and opportunities of initia- tion. In stating the case this way I may possibly seem to be diverging from the doctrines which have often been enforced with great enthusiasm in recent Theosophic writing, and which would rather emphasise the import- ance of unselfishness, philanthropy, altruism, and moral purity as so much more important in their preparatory effect than any efforts of intellectual study, that it is hardly worth while to enjoin any other processes of effort on candidates for future initiation. In saying, however, that the matter must in the first instance be intellectually studied, I am including and not ignoring the preparatory effect of moral qualities. To understand that these constitute an essential factor in the conditions of interior feeling which lead up towards the realities of INITIATION IN THE PRESENT DAY. 403 initiation, is an essential part of that understanding of the whole problem to which I refer. But we must not let our enthusiasm for moral beauty and goodness in the abstract obscure our perception of the great truth that in the normal operation of all the laws which govern spiritual evolution the ultimate effect of good- ness, as worked out in successive lives, is happiness and not necessarily spiritual progress. The anterior causes of spiritual progress must be goodness united with a comprehension of the great design governing spiritual evolution, and of the purposes which Nature has in view in the cultivation of humanity. Again I say, therefore, that the first step for any candidate setting out absolutely from the beginning in the direction of that initiation which alone of all the methods of training his soul can encounter in this life or others can put it in the way of mounting in the scheme of existence— must be study and intellectual effort°up to the limits, whatever they may be, to which his intellectual capacity may at that period have been developed. And if on the basis of a fair general comprehension of the prin- ciples guiding spiritual evolution he unites a really ardent desire to come into contact with their realities, to brave their ordeals, and penetrate their mysteries, that condition of mind during any one given life will, with infallible certainty, engender as its Karmic con- sequence in the next those psychic attributes which will enable him, if his desire persists and his efforts continue, to come into conscious relations with the higher teachers. I do not know of any treatise on this subject, either 404 THE GROWTH OF THE SOUL. in the literature of medizval occultism, modern psy- chology, or Theosophy itself, which has dealt adequately with the circumstances under which those mysterious and sometimes beautiful, sometimes rather terrible and painful developments of psychic faculty, which the experience of life exhibits, are actually developed. We all talk habitually of such faculties as psychic gifts, roughly adopting the phraseology of a very unenlight- ened theory concerning the attributes of man. ‘The use of the phrase “gifts,” whether applied to the faculties in question or to talents of any kind, seems to connote a reverential and grateful attitude of mind towards the unknown Ominipotence from which our existence has been derived ; but to a more enlightened observation it must really be regarded as involving a slur on that Omnipotence, or at all events a reproach against that absolute justice with which the idea of omniscience should be united, if we assume that either class of faculties is given capriciously without having been earned fairly and honestly. One of the most illuminating conceptions connected with the study of spiritual evolution shows us, on the contrary, that mental powers and psychic gifts, together with all those talents which have to do with supremacy in art or in other departments of human activity, are in all cases the consequence of definite effort, definite action, or in the brief and more technical phrase, of the Karma, engendered in former lives. Students of physical science talk with rapture of the beauty involved in the great law which exhibits to us the conservation of energy as operative throughout the various realms of INITIATION IN THE PRESENT DAY. 405 force within the purview of our physical senses. They are strangely oblivious to the still higher beauty of that same law in its association with the higher forces having to do with the cause and effect of spiritual action. So important is it to recognise the old familiar law in its bearing on such higher planes of existence, that one might almost adopt as a brief definition or motto associated with the study of Theosophy,—the conservation of energy on the moral plane. Whatever a man is at any given moment, intellectually, artisti- cally, or in reference to his perceptions as to right and wrong, he is exactly what he has made himself in former lives, working, of course, at each stage with the advantages or disadvantages of surrounding oppor- tunities which are themselves merely the physical and external consequences of still earlier action on his part, —themselves, that is to say, the Karma of his still more remote existences. The always operative condi- tion of his own free will enables him at every step of his progress to mould those conditions into a new shape for his own service at later stages of his long career through the ages; and as regards the faculties with which he will find himself endowed at later stages of his existence, these are, in the simplest and most direct fashion, the consequences of his own anterior efforts and aspirations. Illustrations have been already employed, in examining the doctrine of Re-incarnation as a branch of this subject, which have to do with the growth, for example, of great musical or linguistic acquirements. ‘The capacities of the interior Ego, stimulated by the exertions along any one particular 406 THE GROWTH OF THE SOUL. line of evolution during one life, reappear with the return of the same individuality to Re-incarnation next time, and if continuously exerted expand and develop in almost unlimited degree. ‘The child who is a musical genius at six is the Karmic offspring of some great musician in a former age, or rather constitutes in his own person the Re-incarnation of that great musician. The student of languages in a former age may have forgotten, when he returns to life, the specific vocabu- laries and grammatical rules with which he was once acquainted, but he has filled his nature with such ready affinity for knowledge of that kind that the application in his case of a scarcely perceptible effort enables him to accomplish more than another would succeed in gaining by the protracted labour of years. So with scientific aptitudes, so also with literary appre- ciation, so also with the evolution of psychic faculties. Let a man in one life be filled with a persistent longing to penetrate the mysteries of the psychic plane, with the sympathetic watchfulness of faculties enabling others to do this already, with the fruits of study relating to the whole subject as far as such study has been possible for him, and the result will blossom out as a Karmic consequence in the shape of psychic faculties within his own control on his next appearance on this plane of existence—always supposing that no in- dependent Karmic causes are set up in an antagonistic direction. And this simple law, so obvious in view of what we know at present concerning the principles of Karma and spiritual evolution, will be seen on reflection to cover the whole ground of the inquiry INITIATION IN THE PRESENT DAY. 407 into all those diverse and incoherent varieties of psychic faculty which meet our observation. Sometimes these take the shape of a beautiful spiritual clairvoyance, bringing their happy possessors into direct relations with superior planes of being and the inhabitants thereof. Sometimes they simply render some eyes perceptive of astral phenomena, belonging in no way to any exalted plane of Nature, but yet shut out from the observation of the perfectly common-place physical sight. Sometimes they are united with great loftiness of character and nobility of aim; sometimes they are associated with a grovelling and sordid nature, and again, in other cases—happily rarer than these last— they are associated with positive malevolence and tendencies of an altogether evil kind. But the faculties themselves have in all cases equally been the product of a desire to possess such faculties, and of efforts in that direction. The character with which they may be united is nothing more than on its plane the logical outcome of the efforts and tendencies having to do with the cultivation of character distinguishing the person in question during former lives. So surely as a bullet fired from a gun progresses through the air, so surely is desire or effort no abortive force.