CHAPTER XVI 



POTENTIAL IMMORTALITY 



The modern science of biology shows all life including 

 the human to be the product of evolution of the undying 

 protoplasmic cell. 



The organized life which, by the process of evolution 

 developed out of the fundamental living cell, still maintains, 

 as in the innermost fountain of its being, the same growing 

 and subdividing, never ending substance of life; not merely 

 a principle or spirit or hypothetic ego, but a self-increasing 

 living substance, in a cell organization which does not die, 

 except when some of it is killed by adverse conditions. The 

 better part of it in fact is not killed, but lives from century 

 to century and age to age, and all that now lives has so lived 

 from the beginning. 



Human beings, in common with other creatures with 

 specialized organs, those of digestion and locomotion, and 

 of other faculties, appear to have acquired these as results 

 of cultivation of aptitudes, which may have been experi- 

 mental at first. It is the part of the science of evolution 

 to explain these things to show that these organs were 

 developed in variation, selection and survival. But it is 

 to be emphasized in the study of conduct that the persisting 

 ego of the creature, the master plasm and its offshoot germ- 



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