We are forced to attribute to a star-fish, or to a nettle, its own peculiar and integral consciousness. This throws us at once out of the ideal castle of the brain into the flux of sap-consciousness. But let us not jump too far in one bound. Let us refrain from taking a sheer leap down the abyss of consciousness, down to the invertebrates and the protococci. Let us cautiously scramble down the human declivities. Or rather let us try to start somewhere near the foot of the calvary of human consciousness. Let us consider the child in the womb. Is the fœtus conscious? It must be, since it carries on an independent and progressive self-development. This consciousness obviously cannot be ideal, cannot be cerebral, since it precedes any vestige of cerebration. And yet it is an integral, individual consciousness, having its own single purpose and progression. Where can it be centered, how can it operate, before even nerves are formed? For it does steadily and persistently operate, even spinning the nerves and brain as a web for its own motion, like some subtle spider. What is the spinning spider of the first human consciousness—or rather, where is the center at which this consciousness lies and spins? Since there must be a center of consciousness in the tiny fœtus, it must have been there from the very beginning. There it must have been, in the first fused nucleus of the ovule. And if we could but watch this prime nucleus, we should no doubt realize that throughout all the long and incalculable history of the individual it still remains central and prime, the source and clue of the living unconscious, the origin. As in the first moment of conception, so to the end of life in the individual, the first nucleus remains the creative-productive center, the quick, both of consciousness and of organic development. And where in the developed fœtus shall we look for this creative-productive quick? Shall we expect it in the brain or in the heart? Surely our own subjective wisdom tells us, what science can verify, that it lies beneath the navel of the folded fœtus. Surely that prime center, which is the very first nucleus of the fertilized ovule, lies situated beneath the navel of all womb-born creatures. There, from the beginning, it lay in its mysterious relation to the outer, active universe. There it lay, perfectly associated with the parent body. There it acted on its own peculiar independence, drawing the whole stream of creative blood upon itself, and, spinning within the parental blood-stream, slowly creating or bodying forth its own incarnate amplification. All the time between the quick of life in the fœtus and the great outer universe there exists a perfect correspondence, upon which correspondence the astrologers based their science in the days before mental consciousness had arrogated all knowledge unto itself.