Further, we have to observe that when a material organism perishes and is disintegrated, there is, so far as we can see, an utter and complete end of it. The human brain, for example, quite apart from its association with a consciousness, has in the course of its development and activity gone through a marvellous chain of processes, in which electric and molecular force, undulations, radiations, and probably other physical factors of which we have no conception at present, have played a part. Yet when the brain dies and is resolved into so much ammonia, phosphorus, carbon, gases, and what not, these elements differ in no whit from other ammonia, phosphorus, and carbon in the world. For any ulterior purpose they are neither better nor worse; they are wholly unchanged, by all the extraordinary history which they have passed through under the spell of life. This is equally true of the elements, nervous and other, of any living being. But the physical system of every living being below man is organized for two ends only: (1) the upkeep, during its lifetime, of its own physical powers; (2) the reproduction and multiplication of its kind.[139] When an organism has fulfilled these functions, it is justified; the object of life has been attained. These functions, of course, persist in man, but he has added to them many others; his brain has to serve him for ethics, art, philosophy, religion, and is therefore organized with a subtlety quite unknown in the animal world. Here, then, is a kind of organic action which has no significance whatever _except in relation to consciousness_. If it have none there it has none at all, it is absolutely irrational and futile. Now the molecular and other action of a beast’s brain has reference to its physical life, and it passes on this physical life to its descendants. But the action, or a great part of the action, of a man’s brain has reference to his consciousness, and of this he passes on at most the potentiality. A lion’s cub is a lion; a philosopher’s child is not necessarily or even probably a philosopher. That path of development, whatever we may say about the lion, must have its goal elsewhere. We must, if the universe is not irrational, believe that in some way consciousness, whether after the death of the body it persists in individual form or not, _carries forward into the new state the results of its experiences, its acquisitions, its losses, in the bodily relation_. These are not transitory, not indifferent; “great or small they furnish their parts toward the soul.”