208 HAS SCIENCE DISCOVERED GOD? 



mous game : this large complicated piece of machinery, 

 our body, was not so many years ago squeezed down 

 to the dimensions of a single cell, itself the much con- 

 tracted sum total of the two machines our parents. 

 And if we could probe backwards into times long past 

 we should see a succession of these contractions and 

 expansions stretching back for ever, an unbroken chain 

 of the same individual living and reliving its life as 

 its parents, its grandparents, its animal ancestors; 

 after each separate cell contracting into one little cell 

 until a time is reached when the expansions are so 

 small that they cannot be distinguished from the con- 

 tractions; until the single cell, instead of swelling into 

 a larger being, remained a single cell always. 



Reverse the process back to its true sequence in time 

 and you have your history and mine. When we and 

 the world of living things were young together we 

 just broke in two and so had twins, both of our off- 

 spring being half ourselves. From that day to this 

 the whole of our past history has consisted of an un- 

 broken chain of individuals getting tired of life and 

 dying; but first of all distilling into one cell all that 

 seemed worth while of ourselves so that we might live 

 again In our children. In this way we are our own 

 ancestors, having passed from them through the bottle 

 neck of the germ plasm millions and millions of times 

 until we become ourselves, and, were it not in the 

 process of this distilling ourselves into one cell we 

 have always thrown out conscious memory as being of 

 little value, we would remember what we did when we 

 were our ancestors. 



Some particularly bold scientists assert that although 

 conscious memory was thrown out, unconscious mem- 



