A METAPHYSICAL DISCUSSION 233 



moves quickly through it, one sets up an apparent current of air, 

 and this current may apparently blow in either of two opposite 

 directions, according to the way one moves. It would not be 

 diflB.cult to devise conditions in which it would be impossible for 

 a man to ascertain whether he was at rest and the air were blowing 

 past him, or whether he was being carried through air which was 

 at rest. 



Sa, instead of the environing nature changing as we have 

 suggested, it may be that it is " at rest " ; that it is all there, so to 

 speak, though locally different; and that life changes, or moves, 

 so that it encounters the local modifications, just as a man in a 

 railway carriage is carried through a "changing" landscape 

 which is " really " at rest. 



There is an apparently formidable difficulty to our thinking 

 anything of the kind : we seem to be convinced that nature passes 

 whether we are there or not. We believe that the sun shone 

 and its energy became degraded before we were born, and 

 that it will shine and dissipate its heat after we are dead. 

 Certainly these processes occur while we are asleep and uncon- 

 scious (though we are still there in those conditions, it should 

 be noted). 



It is worth considering whether we are not there also before we 

 were born, and will be there after we are dead; and to those that 

 accept the doctrine of personal immortality the apparent objec- 

 tion we have suggested ought not, of course, to exist. 



Now, we do suggest that we were there, and shall be there, 

 before and after individual life; indeed, that is really the case. 

 We (that is, our life) actually and really existed, in the strictest 

 scientific sense, before our individual lifetime as a fragment of 

 germ plasm in the parental body, and in the grand-parental 

 body before that, and so on indefinitely. And, potentially at 

 least, all the future generations of life are contained in us — in our 

 actual, physical bodies. Therefore, life is continuous, unitary, 

 and always there, just as the hypothetical environment is there 

 simultaneously — ^that is the plainest and most easily grasped 

 result of biological science. 



We ignore it just because we are obsessed by the notion of 

 individual forms, individual bodies, species, genera, families, and 

 so on. But the forms are surely continuous, flowing into and 

 out from each other in an evolutionary process. 



And we are also obsessed by the notion of our personal con- 

 tinuous memories, which are most certainly discontinuous 

 careers, begininng with the awakening of the " categories of the 



