Kamma is an individual energy: as such it is a thing unique: as unique it seizes hold of Kammic, _i.e._ unique material, whereof the uniqueness is proven in the fact that Kamma evolves therefrom a unique being, an individual. If all this marvel of alimentation, this marvel of sight, hearing, and so forth, were obliged to come about as a something entirely new only through external preconditions, never could it come about at all. I learn to see, hear, taste, and so forth, as the flame learns to burn, the flower to blow. All this, down even to the minutest detail, lies ready, prepared beforehand, in the material; and it needs but the stimulator--which, just because it is a question of a unique material, must also be a thing unique--in order to have all these properties brought into play, have them set in full activity. The material lineage of the living being is perforce as beginningless as the Kamma lineage; but whilst the beginninglessness of the latter manifests itself only immediately in consciousness, the beginninglessness of the former admits of being comprehended only mediately as a logical deduction. “Suppose, O monks, that a man were to cut down all the grass and leaves in this Jambudīpa [India], and, gathering them together, take one handful after another and say (at each handful), ‘This is my mother; this is my mother’s mother,’ there would never be any end to the mother’s mother of such a man; but all the grass and leaves in Jambudīpa well might run out, well might come to an end.”[15] Both lineages, the material as the Kammic, are a beginningless, reciprocal, each-to-other self-attunement, in a universe that in its every motion is law itself. To this we shall have to return in the succeeding essay, in treating of the problem of heredity. The man of science will say, “It is no very difficult matter to explain everything if one simply refers everything back to beginninglessness, and assigns as reason for the fact that everything is as it is, that in accordance with the natural conditions of growth it has been _obliged_ to come about thus and not otherwise.” To this it may be said in reply that the Buddha-“reading” of the play of world-events is productive of but little for science, being that reading which is actuality itself--which takes and leaves actuality as that which it is, thereby shutting off the very possibility of all those learned and profound researches which accrue to science in such abundant measure through its endeavours to have actuality become actuality only under its own hands, so to speak; in somewhat the same way that I, the living being, exist to a magistrate, not as myself, but only in virtue of certain identification papers. Besides, the Buddha-thought is an intuition. And the value of an intuition is made manifest solely in its use as a working hypothesis. As a working hypothesis, then, of what service is the Buddha-thought in the domain of physiology? The answer is:--