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Updated: May 10, 2025
And there is nothing exceptional in this: it is merely the reappearance on the plane of the universal and undifferentiated of the same principle that pervades all the forces of Nature. Which of these is not destructive unless drawn off into some definite direction?
The position taken must be this: Though mucous membrane in a highly-evolved individual organism, thus shows the powerful effect of the medium on its surface; yet we must not suppose that the medium had the effect of producing such a cell-structure on the surfaces of primitive forms, undifferentiated though they were; or, if we suppose that such an effect was produced on them, we must not suppose that it was inheritable.
The protoplasm being material substance, must have its origin like all other material substances, in the undifferentiated etheric Universal Substance, no particle of which has any power of operating upon any other particle until some initial vibration starts the movement; so that, on any theory whatever, we are always brought back to the same question: What started the condensation of the ether into the beginnings of a world-system?
This continuous presence of the same dog, through all these twenty years of physical change the old dog reappearing in the new, a dozen times over is what we mean by the constantly differentiating yet undifferentiated "dog-unit."
The supporters of the first theory considered themselves much more scientific and exact than those of the second. And not without reason. For the theory of epigenesis obviously required mysterious formative principles, and equally mysterious powers of recollection and recapitulation, which impelled the undifferentiated ovum substance into the final form, precisely like that of its ancestors.
The god of speed and mechanism that ruled the world today, urging men at ninety miles an hour to enter a Heaven where material gain was only a little sublimated and not utterly denied, would pass for the nightmare that it really was. In its place the cosmic life of undifferentiated simplicity, clean and sweet and big, would hold his soul in the truly everlasting arms.
Preceding the forms of life which now exist, our observer would see animals and plants not identical with them, but like them: increasing their differences with their antiquity, and at the same time becoming simpler and simpler; until, finally, the world of life would present nothing but that undifferentiated protoplasmic matter which, so far as our present knowledge goes, is the common foundation of all vital activity.
Suppose we take, to start with, a race of hunting savages in the earliest, lowest, and most undifferentiated stage, we shall get really next to no personal peculiarities or idiosyncrasies of any sort amongst them. Every one of them will be a good hunter, a good fisherman, a good scalper and a good manufacturer of bows and arrows.
We can easily understand how eager biologists became now in pursuit of the goal which seemed almost within their reach; how interested they were in any new discovery, and how eagerly they sought for lower and simpler types of protoplasm since these would be a step nearer to the earliest undifferentiated life substance.
The effect of advancing culture upon a dog has been gradually to decrease this ancient undifferentiated mode of expression afforded by howling and yelping, and to replace it by the much more speech-like bark. There is some doubt whether the dogs possessed by savages have the power of uttering the sharp, specialized note which is so characteristic of the civilized forms of their species.
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