On the contrary the recognition of
it sets us at liberty to become more fully ourselves because we know that
we are basing our development, not upon the strength of our own unaided
will, nor yet upon any sort of extraneous help, but upon the Universal Law
itself, manifesting through us in the proper sequence of the Creative
Order; so that we are still dealing with Universal principles, only the
principle by which we are now working is the Universal Principle of
Personality.
I wish the student to get this idea very clearly because this is really the
crux of the passage from the Fourth Kingdom into the Fifth. The great
problem of the future of evolution is the introduction of the Personal
Factor. The reason why this is so is very simple when we see it. To take a
thought from my own "Dore Lectures" we may put it in this way. In former
days no one thought of building ships of iron because iron does not float;
yet now ships are seldom built of anything else, though the relative
specific gravities of iron and water remain unchanged. What has changed is
the Personal Factor. It has expanded to a more intelligent perception of
the law of flotation, and we now see that wood floats and iron sinks, both
of them by the same principle working under opposite conditions, the law,
namely, that anything will float which bulk for bulk is lighter than the
volume of water displaced by it, so that by including in our calculations
the displacement of the vessel as well as the specific gravity of the
material, we now make iron float by the very same law by which it sinks.
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