physically connected
with the universal community. Nicolai points out, in passing, the
remarkable relationships between these scientific hypotheses of the last
thirty years and certain mystical intuitions of the Greeks and the early
Christians--"the spirit (pneuma) that quickeneth" (Saint John, vi, 63),
the generative spirit, which is not only distinguished from the flesh,
as Saint John declares, but is likewise distinguished from the soul, as
appears from a passage in Saint Paul's first epistle to the Corinthians
(xv, 44), where the "spiritual body" (soma pneumatikon) is contrasted
with the "natural body" (soma psuchikon). The spiritual body is declared
to be more essential than the natural body (the psychical or
intellectual body); and the former really and materially penetrates the
bodies of all men.

Nor is this all. The studies made by contemporary biologists, and
notably by the Russian biologist Janicki, on sexual reproduction[65]
have explained how this method of reproduction safeguards the
homogeneity of the germ plasm in an animal species, and how it
unceasingly renews the mutual contacts among the individual members of a
race. Janicki writes: "The world, if I may say so, has not been broken
up into a mass of independent fragments, which then, for ever isolated
one from another, ... must strike out for themselves on straight
courses, with only side branches. On the contrary, owing to bi-sexual
reproduction (amphimixis), the image of the macrocosm is ... reflected
as a microcosm in each part; and the macrocosm resolves itself into a
thousand microcosms.... Thus the individuals, while remaining
independent, are materially and continuously interconnected, like
strawberry plants whose runners are joined together.... Each separate
individual develops, as it were, through an invisible system of rhizomes
(subterranean roots) which unite the germ substances of countless
individualities."--Thus it has been calculated that in the twenty-first
generation, in five hundred years let us say, and supposing an average
of three children to each couple, the posterity of a single couple will
be equal in number to the entire human race. It may, therefore, be said
that each one of us has within him a small portion of the living
substance belonging to every one of the human beings that were living
five hundred years ago. Consequently it is absurd that anyone should
wish to restrict an individual, be he whom he may, within the categ