The past is purely speculative from the standpoint of the average man and the future is equally so, but he himself is the result of that past and the future will work out of the sum total of his present characteristics and qualities. If this is true of the individual it is then also equally true of mankind as a whole. That unit in nature, which we call the fourth or human kingdom, represents that which is the product of its physical heritage; its characteristics are the sum of its emotional and mental unfoldments and its assets are those which it has succeeded in accumulating during the cycles wherein it has [17] been wrestling with its environment - the sum total of the other kingdoms in nature. Within the human kingdom lie potentialities and latencies, characteristics and assets which the future will reveal and which in their turn determine that future.

I have purposely chosen to begin with the undefinable and the unrecognized. The soul is as yet an unknown quantity. It has no real place in the theories of the academic and scientific investigators. It is unproven and regarded by even the more open-minded of the academicians as a possible hypothesis, but lacking demonstration. It is not accepted as a fact in the consciousness of the race. Only two groups of people accept it as a fact; one is the gullible, undeveloped, childlike person who, brought up on a scripture of the world, and being religiously inclined, accepts the postulates of religion - such as the soul, God and immortality - without questioning. The other is that small but steadily growing band of Knowers of God, and of reality, who know the soul to be a fact in their own experience but are unable to prove its existence satisfactorily to the man who admits only that which the concrete mind can grasp, analyze, criticize and test.