roaden
as evolution goes on. The word "self" ceases to be wholly personal,
and begins to include subjects of affection and interest, and these
become increasingly numerous as intelligence and depth of character
develop, and as civilisation extends. The sacrifice of the personal
desire for repose to the performance of domestic and social duties
is an everyday event with us, and other sacrifices of the smaller to
the larger self are by no means uncommon. Life in general may be
looked upon as a republic where the individuals are for the most
part unconscious that while they are working for themselves they are
also working for the public good.

We may freely confess ignorance of the outcome in the far future of
that personal life to which we each cling passionately in the joyous
morning of the affections, but which, as these and other interests
fail, does not seem so eminently desirable in itself. We know that
organic life can hardly be expected to flourish on this earth of
ours for so long a time as it has already existed, because the sun
will in all probability have lost too much of its heat and light by
then, and will have begun to grow dark and therefore cold, as other
stars have done. The conditions of existence here, which are now
apparently in their prime, will have become rigorous and
increasingly so, and there will be retrogression towards lower types,
until the simplest form of life shall have wholly disappeared from
the ice-bound surface. The whole living world will then have waxed
and waned like an individual life.

Neither can we discover whether organisms here are capable of
attaining the average development of organisms in other of the
planets that are probably circling round most of the myriads of stars,
whose physical constitution, where-ever it has as yet been observed
spectroscopically, does not differ much from that of our sun. But we
perceive around us a countless number of abortive seeds and germs; we
find out of any group of a thousand men selected at random, some who
are crippled, insane, idiotic, and otherwise born incurably
imperfect in body or mind, and it is possible that this world may
rank among other worlds as one of these.

We as yet understand nothing of the way in which our conscious
selves are related to the separate lives of the billions of cells of
which the body of each of us is composed. We only know that the
cells form a vast nation, some members of which are always dying and
oth