ould, for the present at any rate, be an empty boast. It is
enough if a system is true as far as it goes; if it throws new light
on old problems, and opens up vistas which reveal a hope of further
addition to our knowledge, and this I believe may be fairly claimed for
the theory of life put forward in "Life and Habit" and "Evolution,
Old and New," and for the corollary insisted upon in these pages; a
corollary which follows logically and irresistibly if the position I
have taken in the above-named books is admitted.

Let us imagine that one of the cells of which we are composed could
attain to a glimmering perception of the manner in which he unites
with other cells, of whom he knows very little, so as to form a greater
compound person of whom he has hitherto known nothing at all. Would he
not do well to content himself with the mastering of this conception,
at any rate for a considerable time? Would it be any just ground of
complaint against him on the part of his brother cells, that he had
failed to explain to them who made the man (or, as he would call it, the
omnipotent deity) whose existence and relations to himself he had just
caught sight of?

But if he were to argue further on the same lines as those on which he
had travelled hitherto, and were to arrive at the conclusion that there
might be other men in the world. besides the one whom he had just
learnt to apprehend, it would be still no refutation or just ground of
complaint against him that he had failed to show the manner in which his
supposed human race had come into existence.

Here our cell would probably stop. He could hardly be expected to arrive
at the existence of animals and plants differing from the human race,
and uniting with that race to form a single Person or God, in the
same way as he has himself united with other cells to form man. The
existence, and much more the roundness of the earth itself, would be
unknown to him, except by way of inference and deduction. The only
universe which he could at all understand would be the body of the man
of whom he was a component part.

How would not such a cell be astounded if all that we know ourselves
could be suddenly revealed to him, so that not only should the vastness
of this earth burst upon his dazzled view, but that of the sun and of
his planets also, and not only these, but the countless other suns which
we may see by night around us. Yet it is probable that an actual being
is hidden from us,