No one seemed inclined to dispute with this expounder of mysteries and with a self-satisfied air he resumed his critical examination of the ancient fossil. To be told that in nearly all directions the Entoans are further advanced than are the peoples of Earth, and in a breath to bring you face to face with their extremely circumscribed and absurd religious ideas and beliefs, out of which have grown equally circumscribed and absurd notions relating to certain scientific matters, naturally, may occasion you to hesitate as to your acceptance of other statements we have made and others yet to follow. Realizing this, we consider it advisable to offer an explanation of a seeming paradox. Through the process of unfoldment, spiritualized humans grow into clearer, higher conceptions of personality. Through ages of ignorance and savagery intuitively they grope their ways toward truth, which, like a beacon light, beckons them onward and upward, and slowly, but surely, their consciousness grows and unfolds as lotus blooms grow and unfold from ooze and darkness into sunlight. _Thus, through ages the Entoans evolved into a recognition of self as personality, but not as spirit_, for Andûman[a:], being to them a Material Personality, naturally, they could not conceive of aught more sublimated than their Creator. Still their unrecognized spiritual forces inevitably urged them forward, and in their history a period arrived when to a degree, society became organized, and about certain centres congregated those most learned in such sciences and arts as had resulted from ages of evolution. As yet the masses were almost wholly uneducated, consequently their ideas relating to social obligations and other niceties of civilization were extremely crude. Wars between different nations were continually waged, and of necessity, the weaker succumbed to the stronger. Selfish, ambitious, cruel and successful leaders grew arrogant, and the people were impoverished and enslaved and such civilization as existed seemed threatened with extinction. It is a fact that under adverse conditions, humanity degenerates more rapidly than under favoring conditions it is capable of progression. Were this truth generally recognized, it might act as a deterrent against the reckless, criminally foolish conduct of nations who rush into wars as though they were a pleasurable pastime, rather than a damning process for the breeding of generations of preordained murderers, suicides, thieves and prostitutes--the inevitable results of inherited tendencies.