It may be that the cells of which we are built up, and which we have already seen must be considered as separate persons, each one of them with a life and memory of its own—it may be that these cells reckon time in a manner inconceivable by us, so that no word can convey any idea of it whatever. What may to them appear a long and painful process may to us be so instantaneous as to escape us altogether, we wanting some microscope to show us the details of time. If, in like manner, we were to allow our imagination to conceive the existence of a being as much in need of a microscope for our time and affairs as we for those of our own component cells, the years would be to such a being but as the winkings or the twinklings of an eye. Would he think, then, that all the ants and flies of one wink were different from those of the next? or would he not rather believe that they were always the same flies, and, again, always the same men and women, if he could see them at all, and if the whole human race did not appear to him as a sort of spreading and lichen-like growth over the earth, not differentiated at all into individuals? With the help of a microscope and the intelligent exercise of his reason, he would in time conceive the truth. He would put Covent Garden Market on the field of his microscope, and would perhaps write a great deal of nonsense about the unerring “instinct” which taught each costermonger to recognise his own basket or his own donkey-cart; and this, _mutatis mutandis_, is what we are getting to do as regards our own bodies. What I wish is, to make the same sort of step in an upward direction which has already been taken in a downward one, and to show reason for thinking that we are only component atoms of a single compound creature, LIFE, which has probably a distinct conception of its own personality though none whatever of ours, more than we of our own units. I wish also to show reason for thinking that this creature, LIFE, has only come to be what it is, by the same sort of process as that by which any human art or manufacture is developed, _i.e._, through constantly doing the same thing over and over again, beginning from something which is barely recognisable as faith, or as the desire to know, or do, or live at all, and as to the origin of which we are in utter darkness,—and growing till it is first conscious of effort, then conscious of power, then powerful with but little consciousness, and finally, so powerful and so charged with memory as to be absolutely without all self-consciousness whatever, except as regards its latest phases in each of its many differentiations, or when placed in such new circumstances as compel it to choose between death and a reconsideration of its position.