and yet remained alive. If they travelled slowly, they would die; if
fast, they would catch fire, as meteors do on entering the earth's
atmosphere. The idea, again, of their having been created by a
quasi-anthropomorphic being out of the matter upon the earth was at
variance with the whole spirit of evolution, which indicated that no
such being could exist except as himself the result, and not the
cause, of evolution. Having got back from ourselves to the monad, we
were suddenly to begin again with something which was either
unthinkable, or was only ourselves again upon a larger scale--to
return to the same point as that from which we had started, only made
harder for us to stand upon.

There was only one other conception possible, namely, that the germs
had been developed in the course of time from some thing or things
that were not what we called living at all; that they had grown up,
in fact, out of the material substances and forces of the world in
some manner more or less analogous to that in which man had been
developed from themselves.

I first asked myself whether life might not, after all, resolve
itself into the complexity of arrangement of an inconceivably
intricate mechanism. Kittens think our shoe-strings are alive when
they see us lacing them, because they see the tag at the end jump
about without understanding all the ins and outs of how it comes to
do so. "Of course," they argue, "if we cannot understand how a thing
comes to move, it must move of itself, for there can be no motion
beyond our comprehension but what is spontaneous; if the motion is
spontaneous, the thing moving must he alive, for nothing can move of
itself or without our understanding why unless it is alive.
Everything that is alive and not too large can be tortured, and