The explanations of the esoteric doctrine which have been publicly given, have shown that humanity in the mass has now attained a stage in the great evolutionary cycle from which it has the opportunity of growing upward towards final perfection. In the mass it is, of course, unlikely that it will travel that road: final perfection is not a gift to be bestowed upon all, but to be worked for by those who desire it. It may be put within the theoretical reach of all; there may be no human creature living at this moment, of whom it can be said that the highest possibilities of Nature are impossible of attainment, but it does not follow by any means that every individual will attain the highest possibilities. Regarding each individual as one of the seeds of a great flower which throws out thousands of seeds, it is manifest that only a few, relatively to the great number, will become fully developed flowers in their turn. No unjust neglect awaits the majority. For each and every one the consequences of the remote future will be precisely proportioned to the aptitudes he develops, but only those can reach the goal who, with persistent effort carried out through a long series of lives, differentiate themselves in a marked degree from the general multitude. Now, that persistent effort must have a beginning, and granted the beginning, the persistence is not improbable. Within our own observation of ordinary life, good habits, even though they may not be so readily formed as bad ones, are not difficult to maintain in proportion to the difficulty of their commencement. For a moment it may be asked how this may be applied to a succession of lives separate from each other by a total oblivion of their details; but it really applies as directly to the succession of lives as to the succession of days within one life, which are separated from each other by as many nights. The certain operation of those affinities in the individual Ego which are collectively described in the esoteric doctrine by the word Karma, must operate to pick up the old habits of character and thought, as life after life comes round, with the same certainty that the thread of memory in a living brain recovers, day after day, the impressions of those that have gone before. Whether a moral habit is thus deliberately engendered by an occult student in order that it may propagate itself through future ages, or whether it merely arises from unintelligent aspirations towards good, which happily for mankind are more widely spread than occult study as yet, the way it works in each case is the same. The unintelligent aspiration towards goodness propagates itself and leads to good lives in the future; the intelligent aspiration propagates itself in the same way plus the propagation of intelligence; and this distinction shows the gulf of difference which may exist between the growth of a human soul which merely drifts along the stream