RELATIONS OF INDIVIDUALS. 95 



It is in a measure conceivable that physical agents might 

 produce something like the body of the lowest kinds of 

 animals or plants, and that, under identical circumstances, 

 the same thing may have been produced again and again, 

 by the repetition of the same process ; but that, upon 

 closer analysis of the possibilities of the case, it should 

 not have at once appeared how incongruous the further 

 supposition is, that such agencies could delegate the power 

 of reproducing what they had just called into existence 

 to those very beings, with such limitations that they could 

 never reproduce anything but themselves, I am at a loss 

 to understand. It will no more do to suppose, that, from 

 simpler structures, such a process may end in the produc- 

 tion of the most perfect, as every step implies an addition 

 of possibilities not even included in the original case. 

 Such a delegation of power can only be an act of intelli- 

 gence ; while between the production of an indefinite 

 number of organized beings as the result of a physical 

 law, and the reproduction of these same organized beings 

 by themselves, there is no necessary connexion. The 

 successive generations of any animal or plant cannot 

 stand, as far as their origin is concerned, in any causal 

 relation to physical agents, if these agents have not the 

 power of delegating their own action to the full extent to 

 which they have already been productive in the first ap- 

 pearance of these beings ; for it is a physical law, that the 

 resultant is equal to the forces applied. If any new being 

 has ever been produced by such agencies, how could the 

 successive generations enter, at the time of their birth, 

 into the same relations to these agents, as their ancestors, 

 if these beings had not in themselves the faculty of sus- 

 taining their character, in spite of these agents 1 Why, 

 again, should animals and plants at once begin to decom- 



