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If we double each dimension of our amoeba, we shall increase its surface four times, its mass eight-fold. Now the power of absorbing oxygen and excreting waste is evidently proportional to the excretory and respiratory surface, and much the same is true of digestion.
Instinctive action may be voluntary, but it is, after all, not so much the result of individual purpose as of hereditary tendency. Is there then no will in the animal until it has become intelligent? I think there has been a sort of voluntary action all the time. Even the amoeba selects or chooses, if I may use the word, its food among the sand grains.
It was as though those who had insisted on the derivation of all forms of the steam- engine from the common kettle, and who saw that this stands in much the same relations to the engines, we will say, of the Great Eastern steamship as the amoeba to man, were to declare that the Great Eastern engines were not designed at all, on the ground that no one in the early kettle days had foreseen so great a future development, and were unable to understand that a piecemeal solvitur ambulando design is more omnipresent, all-seeing, and all-searching, and hence more truly in the strictest sense design, than any speculative leap of fancy, however bold and even at times successful.
As the fulness of the conscious mental existence of a man stands to the subconscious activities of an amoeba or of a visceral ganglion cell, so our reason forces us to admit other possible mental existences may stand to us.
But it must not be supposed that an animal or plant has ever conceived the idea of some organ widely different from any it was yet possessed of, and has set itself to design it in detail and grow towards it. The small jelly-speck, which we call the amoeba, has no organs save what it can extemporise as occasion arises.
Whether these would be deemed sufficient or no, at any rate we cannot believe that a system of self-reproducing associations should develop from the simplicity of the amoeba to the complexity of the human body without the presence of that memory which can alone account at once for the resemblances and the differences between successive generations, for the arising and the accumulation of divergences for the tendency to differ and the tendency not to differ.
Within the limits of its simple body, Amoeba performs the several tasks which nature demands a living thing shall do; it feeds and respires and moves, continually utilizing matter and energy obtained from the environment for the reconstruction of its substance and replenishment of its vital powers; it coördinates the activities of its simple body, and by its reflex responses to environmental influences it maintains its adjustment to the external conditions of life.
The lowly amoeba can perform these unenterprising functions more fitly than himself. And the Artist would never be satisfied with so mean and meagre an ambition as merely to adapt himself to his surroundings and fit himself to survive. If he saw evidence of no higher expectation than that in the workings of Nature, his heart would certainly not cleave to her heart.
This is the process of spore-formation and we see that from a single individual we may have by division, not two animals as in the amoeba, but a score or more of them. The little cysts or capsules that inclose them enable them to resist without injury many vicissitudes that would otherwise destroy them.
There are traces of mind in the amoeba, and of unselfishness in the lower mammals. If there were a goal of human development higher and other than unselfishness, wisdom, and love, we should have seen traces of it before this. But have we found the faintest sign of any such? Moreover, remember that a function continues to develop about as long as it shows the capacity for development.
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