Egeria has convinced me that the average child, besides being born mentally and spiritually healthy, has immense capacity on every side of his being.

The plum ideal is the true nature of the plum, but is not the true nature of the bullace.

But Egeria has convinced me that the human ideal--the divine self--is the true nature of each of us, even of the average rustic child; and she has also convinced me that each of us can go a long way towards realising that ideal.

Had there been no Egeria in Utopia, the Utopians would have lived and died undeveloped, having arrived at a maturity of a kind, the maturity of the bullace as distinguished from that of the plum, but having failed to realise in any appreciable degree what the Utopian experiment has proved to be their true nature.

What then?
Is this the end of the average man?
Will Nature admit final defeat?
The curve of a man's life, as it sweeps round from birth to death, passes through the point of apparent maturity; but the real nature of the man has never ripened, and when he descends into the grave he is still the embryo of his true self.
Will the true self never be realised?
Never, if death is indeed the end of life.