THE PRIMAL MIND 
whole, clothed with new powers and purposes, plays 
the drama of organic nature? Who can say that it 
even seems designed for this purpose? On the con- 
trary, from our human point of view, how casual 
and uncertain the drama appears! Inside of this 
stupendous carnival of the physicochemical forces 
—at far removed points, and doubtless at vast 
intervals of time, flickering here and there in the 
cosmic darkness like a dim taper — appears this 
mysterious change, this light which we call life and 
mind, appears and disappears, like the lamps of the 
fireflies of a summer night, confined to a very narrow 
range of thermal and physical conditions, and, in its 
higher manifestations on our planet, at least, limited 
to a very narrow period of time. 
In our solar family of nine planets (considering 
the asteroids as fragments of an exploded body be- 
tween Mars and Jupiter) only one is unmistakably 
the abode of life, with a strong probability in favor 
of Mars. Our earth is the seventh child of the Sun 
in point of time, and on it life is clearly as yet in the 
heyday of youth. But what an enormous prepon- 
derance of lifeless matter the other planets present! 
Though the superior planets are eons older and 
thousands of times larger, it is evident that they 
have never been the abode of life, and doubtful if 
they ever can be. As the planets are all made of one 
stuff, and the same physical and chemical laws are 
operative in all, it is evident that the conditions of 
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