ory
of a separate nation or race.

Let us add that thought, too, propagates itself throughout mankind, in
like manner with the germ plasm.

Every thought, once expressed, leads in the human community a life
independent of its creator; undergoes development in other minds; and
has, like the germ plasm, an immortal life. So that, in humanity, there
is neither true birth nor true death, whether material or spiritual.
Empedocles, of old, realised this, for he said:

"Yet another truth will I tell unto thee. Not a mortal thing is truly
born, and death the destroyer is not the end. There is nought but
intermixture and exchange of what is intermixed. But among men it is
customary to term this 'birth.'"

Humanity, therefore, materially and spiritually, is a single organism;
all its parts are intimately connected and share in a common
development.

Upon these ideas there must now be grafted the concept of mutation and
the observations of Hugo de Vries.--If this living substance which is
common to all humanity should, at any time and owing to any influence,
have acquired the capacity for changing[66] after a certain lapse of
time, for instance a thousand years, then all those beings which have in
them a share of this substance may suddenly undergo identical changes.
It is well known that Hugo de Vries has observed such sudden variations
in plants.[67] After centuries of stability in the characteristics of a
species, quite suddenly, in a great number of individuals belonging to
this species, there will one year occur a modification, the leaves
becoming longer, or shorter, etc. Thenceforward this modification will
be propagated as a constant feature, so that, by the following year, a
new species will have come into existence.--The same thing happens among
human beings, especially in the human brain; for, as far as man is
concerned, the most striking instances of variation are found in the
psychic domain. In each year, certain human beings present brain
variations. Such abnormal individuals are sometimes regarded as madmen
and sometimes as men of genius. They herald the coming variations of the
species, variations of which they are the forerunners. At due date, the
same peculiarities will suddenly manifest themselves throughout the
species. Experience shows that transformations, or moral and social
discoveries, appear at the same moment in the most widely separated and
the most various countries. I have myself often been struc