And if he should but stop to consider this cloak-and-suit-model repetition of himself previously suggested, this system or pattern after which he and all the endless decillions which have preceded and will follow him are made, do you suppose he could exact anything which suggested individuality or personal persistence as a spirit or thought--self-generated thought--out of it? Is one button wiser or much more important than any other, or at all more likely to outlast another spiritually? Is it in any way essential that it should? The original model for the button might be important, but as for the endless copies! Indeed in the whole program of repetition, in so far as man or any of the animals or insects or of matter itself is concerned, there is but one ray of light or hope, and that is that the ion or electron of which all and everything appears to be composed may after all be the only true base or unit of expression of the so-called controlling spirit or force or forces of life, not the various contesting combinations of them, and that this ionic sea or mass, while controlled by the necessity of division and recombination, if it wishes to express itself at all (“The Kinetic Theory,” J. C. Vogt), is still so large and so involute in its creative processes as to be necessarily more or less indifferent to any form of ionic self-expression or combination that might occur under or with it. So that the mere fact that groups or volumes of itself (ions) should combine for any purpose or generate themselves into any special forms of life (via combination, of course)--suns, planets, animals, races, nations, and their special developments again--might be to it a matter of absolutely no consequence. What matter if the electrons of some minute part of itself should organize and set up some special sun or planet or race of individuals, so long as they did not prove troublesome to the rest of the ionic sea? Supposing there are vast galaxies of self-generated suns in space--endless space, composed of but a part of the total ionic mass--so long as they are a mere negligible nothing to the totality of enduring force; what of it? If such were the case it is entirely conceivable that anything might arise for a time, any system of suns or race-life on suns or planets, and also the domination of one organized group of ions over another, but all subject nevertheless in the course of time and according to some equational and inescapable law to the totality of primary ionic or universal force. In that case such a statement as occurs in Genesis iii. 5, would be plain enough. Some self-generated combination of ions looking upon itself as a creator in its own right (for a period anyhow), and having sub-invented man for some purpose of its own, self-expression or comfort, or the use of other enslaved ions to do its bidding, might say just that (“For God doth know,” etc.); and it would be true.