40 THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 



recall their presence in many districts of Nature and 

 in many lands. He is familiar with all their doings ; 

 but they are strangers to him. They are old 

 acquaintances, but they are not friends. Notwith- 

 standing his long familiar knowledge of their ways, 

 they are unintelligible to him. His very ac- 

 quaintance with their behaviour merely helps to 

 divert them from his comprehension, and to elude 

 his grasp. 



They are merely shadows, when he was wont to 

 look upon them as realities. The fundamental prin- 

 ciple is absent ; and the connecting link cannot be 

 found. Knowledge is bewilderment, and isolated 

 scraps he once thought intelligible to him are merely 

 the unworthy fragments of a something that he ought 

 to but cannot understand. 



But more advanced, with strange surprise, the 

 mutual links at length commence to dawn upon him, 

 and the things once hopelessly isolated, at length, one 

 by one, begin to reveal the connections that exist 

 between them : and the intellectual puzzle stands 

 out before him as a related whole. He finds what 

 seemed distant and unintelligible commence to stand 

 out as entities in a system which is at once more in- 

 timate. The actual connections are absent but the 

 common qualities are there. 



We have then reached the Classificatory stage. 

 But although we can perceive connections, we do not 

 yet know what those connections are. Not until we 

 can frame hypotheses or picture models which exhibit 

 similar connections can it be said that we have 



