A philosopher of that mind and reckoning has presented us with a picture in which we see life coming (may be from very far, coming, we may think, although concealed, by the material pathway from the ether that science has revealed to us) as an enormous impetus which finds the first of its advantages that are discernible by us, in that colloid assembly of compounded, complicated, delicately-strung, hair-trigger-hung elements, the protoplasmic stuff. We plainly see a new beginning which, in philosophic truth, is a continuance in new manners upon this earth of that which has no beginning; we see a living thing which lives because an impulsive and propulsive life, not material but spiritual, has raised material elements from the rank of dust, and has found a means of using material powers to purposes and ends. And this philosopher tells us that from its marvellous but humble first appearing in matter life advances, not like the trickle of a single stream, but like the bursting forth of a potent, spreading fountain whose waters part in a thousand directions to make a thousand streams, each purposive, each at first seeking, but many of them unsuccessfully, to fulfil some part of the purpose of the whole. And in regard to this frequent unsuccess, we find the philosopher borne out by the palaeontologist, whose 'general picture ... of the evolution of the animal kingdom is accordingly that of an immense number of ... lives which evolve parallel to one another, and without coalescing, throughout longer or shorter geological times,' each of which 'culminates sooner or later in mutations of great size and highly specialized characters, which become extinct and leave no descendants.' At the heart of life, as in the philosophic mirror we watch its advance, there seems one guiding and supreme purpose, which is manifest in the continuous effort 'to engraft on the necessity of physical forces the largest possible amount of indetermination,' that is, of freedom in choice. But this purpose is evidently very hard to fulfil, and as we see, often fails of being fulfilled.