Accident and the stress of growth have sometimes obliterated those words for years and centuries. Civilisations have misinterpreted some of those words and barbarisms have rubbed them out, schools of Religions and schools of thought have meddled with them and altered them, yet they have always returned, and not only returned, but brought other words with them. The aim and object of life, Haeckel, are the carriage of those sealed orders, and the implicit obedience of the directions that appear age by age on their envelope, till, who knows, some day the word “Open” may be found there, and some glimpse of the great Ideal be permitted to the eyes of man. APPENDIX C THE MYSTERY OF ANALOGY AND SIMILE My companion likened the present-day world to a big head with the brains on the outside. The idea is absolutely just; we have even the two hemispheres of the brain in the eastern and western world. In future years, when telegraphy and telephony are more highly developed—and, who knows, telepathy also—the idea will even be more true than it is to-day. In this connection: have you ever considered the deep mystery that lies in Analogy? In the universe of mind and matter, why do we see the same idea repeated in widely different forms. The whole world of structure is a world of plagiarism. The skull and a nut are the structural outcome of the same idea, so are the cockle and the almond—but imitations of structure are nothing to the fact that root ideas, like that governing the structure of the vertebrates, strike upward into the worlds of thought and action. We have vertebrates in businesses, business with brains, spinal cords, sympathetic nervous systems all complete. In states, armies, and more vaguely in philosophies, policies, and all structures of thought, whether they be theories, or poems, or plays, or novels, the vertebrate idea is found. Why is the life history of a man so extraordinarily like the life history of a nation, and the story of a man’s day a little poetical simile of a man’s life? Why does the poetical simile satisfy the mind when, for instance, we talk of a sea that smiles, or compare a sunset to the fading of a fortune? Is it because we have struck, half-unconsciously, on the key to the riddle of the universe; that the conditions upon which the universe of mind and matter clings, as snow clings to branches and twigs, are exceedingly few—are derived from the same trunk and strike upward, through the material and spiritual world, just as tree branches and twigs strike upward through denser and lighter layers of air.