Study in Karma

Author(s): Annie Besant
Publisher: Theosophist Office Adyar

Page 94

TWO OPPOSING SCHOOLS
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placed amid good ones would grow into a good man. The failure of Robert Owen's great social experiment showed that his theory did not contain all the truth. Others, realising the force of heredity, almost ignored environment; “Nature," said Ludwig Buchner, "is stronger than nurture”. In both these extreme views there is truth. Inasmuch as the child brings with him the nature built in his past, but dons the garments of a new mentality and a new emotional nature, in which his self-created faculties and qualities exist indeed, but as germs, not as fully developed powers, these germs may be nourished into rapid growth or atrophied by lack of nourishment, and this is wrought by the influence of the environment, for good or ill. Moreover, the child puts on also the garment of a new physical body, with its own physical heredity, designed for the expression of some of the powers he brings