But time confines and restricts man not only in this, but in all respects. To take another example, we know that man possesses a multitude of different faculties and talents. But in time he cannot utilize them all. As a member of society he devotes himself to a certain trade or profession. Now there are thousands of different possible activities and therefore thousands of different talents that every man might develop but never can, simply for lack of time. Time is not even sufficient to fully develop one human talent in one definite direction. Man has at his disposal only the present moment, and in each moment he can only think one thought, perform one act, satisfy one need. It is said that man should develop all his faculties _evenly_, but so long as he lives in time this is an impossibility. As a matter of fact man can only live this life piecemeal, and in this time-existence proper we have the explanation of the fact that man distributes his body over a series of cell-generations. The law of the indestructibility of matter and energy is valid also in the ideal world and this necessarily since it is a demand of thought itself.[3] Applied to spiritual substance, which can exist only in the form of living individuals, the law may be expressed, “All living beings are immortal.” If therefore the cell-generations that in the past composed man’s organism can no more be annihilated than the future generations can be created from nothing, this implies that man has an individual existence not only after but _before_ his entrance into this world. If such be the case we must be able to derive and explain our earthly life from this pre-existence. Can it now be shown that man’s conditions in his pre-existence are such that he needs and must go through an evolution in time? In that case history may perhaps give us a hint how to answer the question, or would this pre-existence be an entirely new thought? By no means. Pre-existence is and must be a fundamental idea in all religions because they all suppose that man emanated from God through an original act of creation. That the Christian religion especially has this basic idea Victor Rydberg has fully demonstrated in a treatise entitled “Man’s Pre-existence.” But although we may say that all religions teach a pre-existence we do not mean that this idea has been or even could have been rightly understood. We might expect just the contrary, as pre-existence is connected with the common conception that man’s soul as well as the material world was once created in time, in which case pre-existence can only mean an existence extending very far back in time. There was a time when God existed but not man, which latter, as being created, must have an _existence separate from God_ even if he may in other respects be called His image.