i 882.] 
Death not Universal. 
403 
Or shall we try to regard them as brothers, sprung from 
the same parent ? If so, where is that parent ? If living, 
let it be shown ; if dead, where are its remains ? No organic 
— or indeed any other — matter was separated out when the 
two new beings took their rise. All the substance of the 
body of the original Protozoon is included, and equally in- 
cluded, in the bodies of the two individuals before us. Thus 
we see that the essential ideas of the life of the higher ani- 
mals — birth, growth, maturity, parentage, brotherhood, term 
of life, and successive generations — have, if applied to these 
humble and minute beings, simply no meaning. 
The process of reproduction, or rather of multiplication, 
must, as far as we can see, be repeated in the same manner 
for ever. Accidents excepted, they are immortal ; and fre- 
quent as such accidents must be, the individuals whom they 
strike might, or rather would, like the rest of their commu- 
nity, have gone on living and splitting themselves up for 
ever. It is strange, when examining certain Infusoria under 
the microscope, to consider that these frail and tiny beings 
were living, not potentially in their ancestors, but really in 
their own persons, perhaps in the Laurentian epoch ! 
This consideration opens up another question. These 
beings are not wholly unconscious. They experience and 
retain impressions, however dimly and in however limited a 
sphere. But when the splitting up one individual into two 
distinct personalities takes place as we have described above, 
we have then the curious phenomenon of two distinct and 
equal beings whose past life is one, who will remember the 
same incidents and the same reactions to which such inci- 
dents have given rise. Here again is a phenomenon which 
we cannot realise, — two contemporary and coequal beings 
possessing, up to a certain point at least, a common psychic 
life. Let us for a moment suppose that the propagation of 
the higher animals took place in a similar manner. We 
should see, e.g., the mature man split up into two equal and 
similar men, each remembering, knowing, believing, and 
feeling, up to the day of fission, all that the other remem- 
bered, knew, believed, or felt ; each, too, it might be con- 
tended by moralists, equally sharing the merits or demerits 
of the antecedent form, and each at a loss to say when his 
own personality took its rise. 
