As remarked already by some critics on “Pessimism and Progress,” the German Pessimist does not doubt it for one moment. His supposed discovery and teaching “rest wholly on his certitude that development and the fundamental law of the complicated process of organization represent but one thing: the transformation of unity into plurality.” Hence the identification of the process with dissolution and decay, and the weakening of all the forces and energies. Mainländer would be right in his analogies were this law of the differentiation of the homogeneous into the heterogeneous to really represent the fundamental law of the evolution of life. But the idea is quite erroneous—metaphysically as well as physically. Evolution does not proceed in a straight line; _no more_ than any other process in nature, but journeys on _cyclically_, as does all the rest. The cyclic serpents swallow their tails like the Serpent of Eternity. And it is in this that the Indian formula, which is a Secret Doctrine teaching, is indeed corroborated by the natural Sciences, and especially by biology. This is what we read in the “Scientific Letters” by an anonymous Russian author and critic. “In the evolution of isolated individuals, in the evolution of the organic world, in that of the Universe, as in the growth and development of our planet—in short wherever any of the processes of progressive complexity take place, there we find, apart from the transition from unity to plurality, and homogeneity to heterogeneity a _converse transformation—the transition from plurality to unity, from the heterogeneous to the homogeneous_.... Minute observation of the given process of progressive complexity has shown, that what takes place in it is not alone the separation of parts, but also their mutual absorption.... While one portion of the cells merge into each other and unite into one uniform whole, forming muscular fibres, muscular tissue, others are absorbed in the bone and nerve tissues, etc. etc. The same takes place in the formation of plants....” In this case material nature repeats the law that acts in the evolution of the psychic and the spiritual: both descend but to re-ascend and merge at the starting-point. _The homogeneous formative mass or element differentiated in its parts, is gradually transformed into the heterogeneous; then, merging those parts into a harmonious whole, it recommences a converse process, or reinvolution, and returns as gradually into its primitive or primordial state._