When trees are on the border of a thick plantation, they make all their growth towards the open air, and are bare and leafless on the opposite side.
In each of these cases the growth made is inharmonious and one-sided: the balance between the two intersecting planes of growth, or between the two opposite sides, has been lost.

But when a tree is planted in the open, and when all the other conditions of growth are favourable, it grows harmoniously in all directions,--upward, outward, and all around.

In other words, it is growing as a whole, growing, as it ought to grow, through every fibre of its being, and yet maintaining a perfect symmetry of form and the harmony of true proportion among its various parts.
This is the kind of growth which the soul makes in the life of self-realisation; and if it falls appreciably short of this standard, if it develops itself on this side or that, to the neglect of all other sides, then we must say of it that, though it is realising this or that faculty or group of faculties, it is not realising itself.

I have spoken of the six great expansive instincts which indicate the main lines of the child's natural growth, and I have shown that in Utopia the cultivation of all those instincts is duly provided for.
In the life of self-realisation the soul would continue to grow on the lines which those instincts had marked out for it.

I do not mean that when the child goes out into the work-a-day world, he must give to all six instincts the systematic training which they received, or ought to have received, in school.