244 FROM COMTE TO BENJAMIN KIDD PART iv 



when the new life is constituted by fertilisation. And 

 therefore " ontogeny " briefly recapitulates " phy- 

 logeny," the individual organism passing rapidly 

 through the stages by which evolutionists hold that 

 the species has grown to be what it now is. The 

 multicellular or higher organisms are only, as it were, 

 loose appendages to certain peculiarly qualified uni- 

 cellar organisms, like great flickering shadows of 

 dwarfs or little children cast by a bonfire. The 

 higher organisms perpetuate themselves qua uni- 

 cellular. They may seem bicellular, because of the 

 curious sexual split into male and female; but we 

 must remember that ovum and spermatozoon com- 

 bine in one to form a new life history. And all the 

 future of the individual life lies in mice in that single 

 cell. And we can further trace this determination 

 of the qualities of maturity by the qualities of the 

 embryo right back through the continuous germ 

 plasm to an age when the whole world of organisms 

 was unicellular. No fresh quality has come to any 

 living creature since life began its ascent. All were 

 implicitly present in the unicellular world; all have 

 been slowly evolved and improved by nature's gigan- 

 tic game of permutations and combinations. She 

 has written out by degrees every possible grouping 

 of the qualities of protoplasm, and has drawn her 

 pen remorselessly through the inefficient ones. The 

 favourite image or parable for this view of heredity 

 given e.g. by Huxley in the notes to his Romanes 

 lecture is that of a plant propagating itself by 

 suckers. Root grows from root; every here and 

 there the root sends upwards a perfect plant, a glory 

 of leaves, flowers, fruit ; in the absence of these the 



