ry, but we are drawn also to the answer that the earth was so
prepared designedly by a Person with body and soul who knew beforehand
the kind of thing he required, and who took the necessary steps to bring
it about.

If this is so we are members indeed of the God of this world, but we
are not his children; we are children of the Unknown and Vaster God who
called him into existence; and this in a far more literal sense than we
have been in the habit of realising [sic] to ourselves. For it may be
doubted whether the monads are not as truly seminal in character as the
procreative matter from which all animals spring.

It must be remembered that if there is any truth in the view put forward
in "Life and Habit," and in "Evolution Old and New" (and I have met
with no serious attempt to upset the line of argument taken in either
of these books), then no complex animal or plant can reach its full
development without having already gone through the stages of that
development on an infinite number of past occasions. An egg makes itself
into a hen because it knows the way to do so, having already made
itself into a hen millions and millions of times over; the ease and
unconsciousness with which it grows being in themselves sufficient
demonstration of this fact. At each stage in its growth the chicken is
reminded, by a return of the associated ideas, of the next step that it
should take, and it accordingly takes it.

But if this is so, and if also the congeries of all the living forms
in the world must be regarded as a single person, throughout their long
growth from the primordial cell onwards to the present day, then, by
parity of reasoning, the person thus compounded-that is to say, Life or
God-should have already passed through a growth analogous to that which
we find he has taken upon this earth on an infinite number of past
occasions; and the development of each class of life, with its
culmination in the vertebrate animals and in man, should be due to
recollection by God of his having passed through the same stages, or
nearly so, in worlds and universes, which we know of from personal
recollection, as evidenced in the growth and structure of our bodies,
but concerning which we have no other knowledge whatsoever.

So small a space remains to me that I cannot pursue further the
reflections which suggest themselves. A few concluding considerations
are here alone possible.

We know of three great concentric phases of life, a