Here, again, as with the individual, so with the entire race. As we outgrow the things of our childhood at the arrival of mature years, so has and will the human family as a whole. Who cannot remember the marvelous width and depth of the vistas of youth, as looked back at in the transmuting light of memory; and yet, when, after years of toil, we look at the same scenes again in reality, how disappointing and dwarfed they are! It is not the actual physical distance which has been altered, but we, ourselves. Our horizons have unconsciously widened every day; our standards of comparison have been insidiously raised. Just as an inch, when compared with a foot, seems relatively small, with a yard, smaller, and so on until we reach the "light year," the value of the fraction is reduced to almost an inappreciable sum; so, as we progress through life, the momentous events of our youth lose their importance, and we look at our past through the minifying glass of experience, until at last we can hardly believe that the person whose life we have been reviewing is, in reality, one with our present self. Furthermore, events seen at a distance assume their true proportions, and we are less influenced by passions and prejudices after the lapse of time; hence it is only in retrospection that we are able to secure a view of anything which we have experienced without distortion. All normal human beings are so constituted that their psychic activity runs through a long series of periods of evolution during each individual life. As Haeckel has shown, five of these, at least, can be clearly defined: 1st--The Infantile Stage--from birth to the beginning of self-consciousness. 2nd--The adolescent stage--from self-consciousness to puberty. 3rd--The idealistic stage--from puberty to the period of sexual intercourse. 4th--The mature stage--from the time of sexual intercourse to the beginning of degeneration with age. 5th--The senile stage--from the commencement of degeneration with age until death. The investigation of a human life, according to this outline, will prove, quite readily, the psychic possibilities of mundane existence.