It is a fact of experience that between living beings there exist peculiar consonances. To a stone or a tree no tie of compassion binds us. Compassion only begins at the animal world, and its limits are individual, and vary according to bringing up. With many compassion is entirely confined to human beings; more especially is this the case with those brought up in the shadow of monotheistic beliefs. In pantheism, on the contrary, as it has prevailed in India from the earliest days, the boundary line of compassion runs right down into the lowest animal kingdom. Meanwhile, among us, too, those incapable of feeling compassion for a dog, a horse, a cow, a cage-bird, are very few. In the last analysis the capacity for compassion consists in the peculiar attunement, consonance existing between one _I_-energy and other _I_-energies. Where, as in the case of the stone, there are no _I_-energies, there can likewise be no compassion. In the Buddha-thought the classification of the phenomena of life adopted is one peculiar to itself alone. The usual crude divisions into stone, plant, animal, and man, or into inorganic and organic, count for nothing here. All these are based upon the assumption that things are fixed quantities, identities; hence they prescribe artificial preconditions, and consequently have no value in themselves but only with reference to some such determined end as increased facility of comprehension. In the Buddha-thought all life-phenomena divide themselves into these two classes--those that have power to act upon me, stimulate or excite me, set me in sympathetic vibration and correspondingly be set in sympathetic vibration by me, and those with which this is not more or not yet the case. We are bound to admit--and all physiological phenomena bear witness to it--that the ovum- and sperm-cell are those forms of development of the _I_-process in which the _I_-energy of the individuals concerned reveals itself in its purest and most intimate, because most intrinsic form. If they are torn apart from the whole in the act of generation, yet are they able to furnish the new _I_-material, because they keep the _I_-energy vibrating sufficiently long in themselves to be able to answer to the Kamma peculiarly attuned to them. Such an apprehension of things would seem like a slap in the face for biology and the whole history of evolution, and here the task of the Buddha-thought is to come to an understanding with the theory of descent if it is to prove satisfactory to the man of education.