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To explain this Weismann went back to the unicellular protozoa. These animals are undoubtedly influenced by environment and vary under its stimuli. Here the variations were stamped upon the germ-plasm, and the commingling of these variously stamped germ-plasms has resulted in all the variations of higher animals. Of late Weismann has modified and greatly improved this portion of his theory.
The mingling of the two produces a germ-plasm and individual differing from both of the parents. Thus, according to Weismann's earlier view, the origin of variation was to be sought in sexual reproduction through the mingling of slightly different germ-plasms. But how did these two germ-plasms come to be different? How was the variation started?
Philosophers and the public imagine that the scientific spirit must pervade pages that bristle with allusions to ions, germ-plasms, and the eyes of shell-fish. But as the devil can quote Scripture, so the philosopher can quote science. The scientific spirit is not an affair of quotation, of externally acquired information, any more than manners are an affair of the etiquette-book.
We have no longer any right to believe in the old oft-refuted hypothesis which assumes that each individual organism produces germ-cells afresh again and again and transmits all its powers developed and acquired by the parents; but, on the contrary, we have come to know to-day that parents are nothing but mere channels through which these germ-plasms or germ-cells manifest their peculiar tendencies and powers which existed in them from the very beginning.
But if the germ-plasm has this constitution and relation to the rest of the body, how is any variation possible? Different individuals of any species have slightly different congenital tendencies. Hence in the act of fertilization two germ-plasms of slightly different structure and tendency are mingled.
Vedanta solves this difficulty by saying that each of these germ-plasms or germ-cells is nothing but the subtle form of a reincarnating individual, containing potentially all the experiences, characters, tendencies, and desires which one had in one's previous life. It existed before the birth of the body and it will continue after the death of the body.
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