hole
distinction between highest and lowest organism being such as exists
between a society of two and a highly complex civilized state. And all
this political life is the spontaneous work of unintelligent units; that
is to say, we have results exceeding the highest ever attained by human
intelligence, long before intelligence or sentience has yet been
evolved.

Nobody will care to support "Pangenesis" as a theory of generation. To
suppose that there is a mysterious power which breaks a little fraction
off each of the bioplasts of which we are asserted to be the sum; that
having collected these fractions it arranges them all in the right order
within the compass of a single germ, and from that germ reproduces the
parent organism, is an hypothesis compared with which the creation of
the world in its entirety six thousand years ago, including the fossils
and remains of aeonian civilizations, is lucid and intelligible. This is
no hyperbole. For if once we allow creation at all, the creation of the
world at any stage of Evolution is just as conceivable as the creation
of primordial atoms. If any living thing were now created (e.g., a
grain of corn or a full ear) it would bear in itself the apparent
evidence of having _grown_ to its present state _ab ovo_; or the _ovum_
itself would seem to ground a similar false inference of having come
from a parent. Strange as such an idea may be, it is easy and pellucid
compared with the hypothesis of Pangenesis--still more when we remember
that this complex germ, which is a lion or a horse in small--itself the
elaboration of aeons of Evolution--can replicate itself with ease and
rapidity, reproducing in adjacent pabulum a "cosmos" which differs in
degree, not in kind, from that described in the story of the Six Days.
Yet the more we look into it, the more clear is it that Pangenesis (and
not Polarigenesis or Perigenesis) is the inevitable outcome of the
aggregation-theory of life.

And therefore to return to our former assertion, whatever we seem to
gain in simplicity of statement by this form of the Evolution theory, we
pay for dearly when we come to its application; nay more, as soon as we
attempt to translate the words into clear and distinct ideas, we are
left with nothing coherent that the mind can get hold of; and it is only
at this price that we can cut away the basis of the "argument from
adaptability," and with it the basis of all reason and morality. We must
therefore go on