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Can Human Nature Change? |
Education and religion are alike based on the assumption
that it is possible to change human nature. In fact, it requires
but little investigation to show that the one thing we can say
with certainty about any living thing is that it cannot keep
from changing. Without change there can be no life. Even the
mineral cannot resist change, and the higher we go in the scale
of being, the more varied, complex, and wonderful do the
changes become. Moreover, in progress and development
among creatures of all grades we find two kinds of change—one slow, gradual, often almost imperceptible; and the other
rapid, sudden and dramatic. The latter occur at what are
called “critical stages” of development. In the case of minerals
we find such critical stages at the melting and boiling points,
for example, when the solid suddenly becomes a liquid or the
liquid becomes a gas. In the case of plants we see such critical
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stages when the seed begins to germinate, or the bud bursts
into leaf. In the animal world we see the same on every hand,
as when the grub suddenly changes into a butterfly, the chick
emerges from its shell, or the babe is born from its mother’s
womb. In the higher life of the soul we often see a similar transformation,
when a man is “born again” and his whole being becomes
radically changes in its aims, its character and activities.
Such critical stages often affect a whole species or multitude of
species simultaneously, as when vegetation of all kinds suddenly
bursts into new life in springtime.
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Bahá’u’lláh declares that just as lesser living things have
times of sudden emergence into new and fuller life, so for mankind
also a “critical stage,” a time of “rebirth,” is at hand.
Then modes of life which have persisted from the dawn of history
up till now will be quickly, irrevocably, altered, and humanity
enter on a new phase of life as different from the old as
the butterfly is different from the caterpillar, or the bird from
the egg. Mankind as a whole, in the light of new Revelation,
will attain to a new vision of truth; as a whole country is illumined
when the sun rises, so that all men see clearly, where but
an hour before everything was dark and dim. “This is a new
cycle of human power,” says ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. “All the horizons
of the world are luminous, and the world will become indeed
as a rose garden and a paradise.” The analogies of nature are
all in favor of such a view; the Prophets of old have with one
accord foretold the advent of such a glorious day; the signs of
the times show clearly that profound and revolutionary
changes in human ideas and institutions are even now in progress.
What could be more futile and baseless therefore, than
the pessimistic argument that, although all things else change,
human nature cannot change?
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