with the experimental spirit and the analytical
method of modern science. The latest biological and embryological
theories are invoked to help in the comment on the hylozoism of the
seven sages and the mysticism of the early Christians. Janicki and de
Vries shake hands with Heraclitus and Saint Paul. The upshot is a
strange vision of materialistic and dynamistic pantheism--a vision of
humanity considered as a body and a soul in unceasing motion.

Nicolai begins by reminding us that this idea has existed in all ages.
He summarises the history of the doctrine. We have the "fire" of
Heraclitus, which for the sage of Ephesus was also the universal
intelligence of the world. We have the same thing in the "pneuma" of the
stoics and in the "pneuma agion" of the primitive Christians, the sacred
energy, the vivifying force, which is the concentrated essence of all
the souls. It is what Origen speaks of as "universum mundum velut animal
quoddam immensum." We encounter the idea once more in the fertile
fancies of Cardanus, Giordano Bruno, Paracelsus, and Campanella.
Animistic ideas are mingled with the science of Newton, and permeate his
hypothesis of universal gravitation. Indeed, Musschenbroek, his
immediate disciple, describes the gravitative principle as "amicitia";
while Lichtenberg tells us that it is the "longing of the heavenly
bodies for one another!" In a word, through the whole development of
human thought runs the belief that our world is a single organism with a
consciousness of its own. Nicolai tells us how it would interest him to
write the history of this idea; and he outlines that history in his
fascinating fourteenth chapter, "The Evolution of the Idea of the World
as Organism."[62]

He then passes to scientific demonstration. Is there, he asks, a
material bond, a bodily, living, and enduring tie, between human beings
of all lands and all ages?[63] He finds a proof that there is such a
bond in the researches of Weismann and in that writer's theory of the
germ plasm, which has now become classic.[64] In each individual, the
cells of the germ plasm continue the life of the parents, of which, in
the fullest sense of the word, they are living portions. They are
undying. They pass, changeless, to our children and to our children's
children. Thus there really persists throughout the whole genealogical
tree a part of the same living substance. A portion of this organic
unity lives in each individual and thereby we are