Q. 1. Is it right to pray for a change of season?
The candidates thought it was not because the relations which produce winter and summer are fixed in the structure of the Solar system and cannot be altered for man’s pleasure or man’s need.

Q. 2. Is it right to pray for rain?
Candidates: Yes, because it is proper to ask for such a change as it does not concern the Economy of the Universe.

Q. 3. When the signal service of the Christian saint is well established so that weather-conditions are perfectly known, will it then be right to pray for rain? No answer.

The essence of prayer is to bring two things into unison – the will of God and the will of man. Superstition imagined, no doubt, that prayer would change the will of God, but the more spiritually minded have always understood that the will which must be modified in prayer was the will of man.

A Law of Nature is no respecter of persons. A varying Multiplication-table would be the destruction of Mathematics. A varying law of Nature would be the destruction of the Universe. Even the law of pity is pitiless and the law of mercy merciless.

* * * *
Humanity is not the goal of Evolution. It is the unspecialized, undifferentiated type from which branches diverge in different ways.

The comparatively undifferentiated type if it do not disappear in the upward struggle, differentiates laterally and hence the present differentiated monkey having branched off from the common stock can never develop into a man. Humanity, is not the goal of Evolution, (the movement of a monkey is toward simianity, not humanity; the movement of cat life is toward felinity; that of the dog races toward caninity). There will be no second creation of man except from man’s own loins.

* * * *
Not progress but adaptation by divergence mostly by slow stages is the movement of Evolution.

* * * *
There is no innate tendency toward progression.

Progression is no necessity regardless of conditions or environments.

If there had been an innate tendency toward progress, millions would not have degenerated or perished through inadaptation.

Evolution is simply orderly change.
Evolution is not a creed or a body of doctrine to be believed on authority.

Science is its own witness, it is no more a religion than gravitation (is).

If its principles are mastered, a knowledge of Evolution is an -aid in the conduct of life, as knowledge of gravitation is essential in the building of machinery.

Bionomics is the science which treats of the changes in life forms and of the laws and forces on which these changes depend. (The Science of Organic Evolution).

It was a surprise to Thoreau that the squirrels went on with their hoard and the wind rustled in the trees as though nothing had happened.

Five Principles of Vedanta.

Struggle. Action (Gita)
Witnessing
Unity – oneness of self
Phenomena = world not to be trusted or set
a heart on.
Brahma Satyam (The Absolute Reality).

With these as working hypotheses set down in the Upanishads as written by myself in the past, I start in my onward investigation. No higher authority than myself.

It was a favourite saying of Agassiz that “Facts are stupid things until brought into connection with some general law.”
Survival of the existing and not of the fittest alone.
Change and not progress necessarily.
Adaptation (obedience) and not improvement (excellence) necessarily.
Harmony (adaptation) (natural selection) must be secured at the cost of struggle.
Concession and not revolt.

Concession to truth and not to men.

When a great truth is given to the world, its representative in making the world adapt herself to him has to give his life.

* * * *
Adaptation (concession) does not mean altruism or individualism conformity.

He who is true to himself and gives out plainly the truth within him, although unconscious of the fact is better fitted to survive because other thousand around him must (by a natural law) have the same idea just repining or struggling to formulate itself in them and his utterance of the truth must sooner or later be met by congenial environments. When one melon is ripening in a field, others must also be.

General individualism and pure altruism are one.

* * * *
In animal kingdom (there is) Struggle.

1. With environments: but
2. In general when the environment is most favourable, the competition of individual with individual will be most severe, like with like.
3. Where this environment is alike favourable, the struggle between species and species becomes intensified. Cf. (Foreign policy).

* * * *
The word struggle is misleading in social evolution. It should be replaced by labour of competition.

* * * *
In our discussion of social Evolution we must sometimes remember that the very perfection of society must always appear as imperfection; for a highly developed society is dynamic.
A static society is in a condition of arrested development.

* * * *
The most highly developed organism shows the greatest imperfections. The most perfect adaptation to conditions needs re-adaptation as conditions themselves speedily change.

The dream of a static millennium when struggles and change shall be over, when all shall be secure and happy, finds no warrant in our knowledge of man and the world.

* * * *
Self-realization in life is possible when self-perdition is also possible.

* * * *
Struggle does not mean with teeth, claws, fists, brute strength, trickery or war. Through all the ages love has been stronger than force and those creatures who could help each other have been stronger than those who could only fight.

That is good which makes me strong and gives strength to my neighbours.

* * * *
“Might does not make right, but that which is right will justify itself in persistence, and persistence is strength or might = that which is weak dies. We only know God’s purpose by what He permits. That which persists and grows must be in line with such purpose. A law is only an observed generalization of what is”

* * * *
Whatever he has done in the past furnishes the law of his future. Whatever he is he must make of himself. Heredity only furnishes the tools, and the environment is the beverage. The branch which does not carry sap withers and dies.

Among the higher animals functional activity is the basis of individual happiness. There is no permanent feeling of joy except through functional activity.
Dissipation, stimulation tricks on the nervous system of any sort whatever gives only a counterfeit happiness.
Subjective joys are followed by subjective misery. There is no pleasure in them.

* * * *
To enjoy life man or animal must be doing, working, thinking, fighting, loving, helping – something positive. And no thought or feeling is complete till it has somehow wrought itself into action.

* * * *
Whatever is right will justify itself sooner or later by becoming might.

* * * *
The race is not “to the swift,” nor “the battle to the strong,” but “to them who can keep together.” More ancient than competition is Combination.

* * * *
The conjugation of Infusonia.
In the conjugation of cells among protozoa appear the beginnings of the gigantic fact of sex.
By this process two minute one-celled creatures come together and part of the hereditary substance of the one is exchanged for that of the other. After this Exchange neither the one nor the other is exactly what it was before. The results of this change are propagated lit the descendants of each.

* * * *
All Science is the outcome of mutual help, co-operation, unity, and common work.

* * * *
But no two scientists need live together,

* * * *
See where the harmony or Unity lies.