The doctrine of karma is, therefore, really the theory of evolution and heredity as working in our moral field. As Walt Whitman fitly sings, in every one of us, “converging objects of the universe” are perpetually flowing, through every one of us is “afflatus surging and surging--the current and index.” And these converging objects and this afflatus are no more than our karma which is interwoven in our being and which is being matured from the very beginning of consciousness upon the earth. Each generation either retards or furthers the maturing of karma and transmits to the succeeding one its stock either impaired or augmented. Those who are blind enough not to {201} see the significance of life, those who take their ego for the sole reality, and those who ignore the spiritual inheritance accumulated from time immemorial,--are the most worthless, most ungrateful, and most irresponsible people of the world. Buddhism calls them the children of Mâra engaged in the work of destruction. Dr. G. R. Wilson of Scotland states a very pretty story about a royal robe in his article on “The Sense of Danger” (_The Monist_, 1903, April), which graphically illustrates how potential karma stored from time out of mind is saturated in every fibre of our subliminal consciousness or in the Âlayavijñâna, as Buddhists might say. The story runs as follows: “An Oriental robe it was, whose beginning was in a prehistoric dynasty of which the hieroglyphics are undecipherable. With that pertinacity and durability so characteristic of the East, this royal garment has been handed down, not through hundreds of years, but through hundreds of generations,--generations, some of them, unconsciously long and stale and dreary; others short and quick and merry. A garment of kings, this, and of queens, a garment to which, as tradition prescribed, each monarch added something of quality,--a jewel of price, a patch of gold, a hem of rich embroidery,--and with each contribution a legend, worked into the imperishable fibre, told the story of the giver. Did something of the personality of these kings and queens linger in the work of their hands? If so, the robe was no dead thing, no mere covering to be lightly assumed or lightly laid aside, but a living {202} power, royal influence, and the wearer, all unwitting, must have taken on something of the character of the dead. It is a princess of the royal blood, perhaps, sensitive and mystical, trembling on the apprehensive verge of monarchy, who dons the robe, and as she dons it, tingles to its message. These great rubies that blaze upon its front are the souvenirs of bloody conquerors. As she fingers them idly, she is thrilled with an emotion she does not understand, for in her blood something answers to the fighting spirit they embody. Pearls are for peace. That rope has been strung by kings and queens who favored art and learning; and as the girl’s fingers stray towards them the