The other assumption is based upon the current doctrine of evolution. Our bodies have been evolved step by step out of inorganic matter, and we have before our eyes a line of organisms connecting man with the simplest atom of matter. In this series there is no hiatus between one form and another, no breach of morphological continuity, but one species arises by insensible gradation out of its predecessors. Now in the case of organisms of a certain complexity we cannot help inferring consciousness, and as we go back along the line we not only see the complexity of the organism and of its nervous system insensibly diminishing, but for the first part of our course we have reason to think that the complexity of consciousness insensibly diminishes also.[38] The conclusion is forced upon us that nature is animate from top to bottom and that the humblest atom has an elementary feeling or eject of its own as simple in comparison with the complex intelligence of man as the atom is itself simple in comparison with his very complex brain. Unless we admit this we are in a dilemma. The ejective facts which we cannot help inferring in the case of all animals must extend further down through vegetables to inorganic phenomena, or else there must be a point at which we could say: here the object begins to have an inner or ejective fact corresponding to it as my mind corresponds to my body. But the series of objective forms presents no sudden break anywhere, not even between animals and vegetables, such as to warrant our supposing that ejective facts extend thus far down in the series and no further. Clifford is not quite as explicit about the nature of the elementary ejects, which answer to moving molecules, as we should like him to be. Of one thing however he is quite certain; they are elementary feelings which yet are neither modifications of a consciousness nor yet imply a consciousness in which alone they can exist. Every feeling may be part of a consciousness, but it need not be so. Consciousness is only a derivative and secondary result, following on the arrangement of feeling in a particular way and it is evolved at a very late period in the history of the world. In itself a feeling is an absolute _Ding-an-sich_, whose existence is not relative to anything else. _Sentitur_ is all that can be said of it. Thus strictly speaking it is not _consciousness_ which extends throughout the series of objective forms from man down to the molecule. It is only feeling. Consciousness proper only belongs to the later and higher members of the series. “If we make a jump from man say to the tunicate mollusks, we see no reason there to infer the existence of consciousness at all.” Therefore the doctrine of evolution itself forbids us to regard all ejects as being of the _same_ substant as mind. They are only of like substance ὁμοιούσιον not ὁμοούσιον, only quasi-mental[39] and not in themselves either rational, intelligent, or conscious.[40]