previous generations are dead and gone, so we may say that they
existed in the universe. We cannot now believe the old, crude,
often-refuted idea that God creates the germ at the time of birth and
puts into it all the powers and peculiarities of the parents. This
theory makes God unjust and partial, so it does not appeal to us any
more. We need better and more rational explanations. The one-birth
theory, which has been preached by Christian ministers and other
religionists for so many years, does not remove the difficulties, does
not explain the cause of the inequalities and diversities, does not
answer the question whether we acquire all the tendencies and
peculiarities of the parents or whether acquired characters cannot be
transmitted. We have already seen that these questions are left
unsolved by the one-birth theory of Christianity and of Judaism. But
this theory of "continuity of the germ-plasm" pushes the question of
heredity to the door of Reincarnation. If modern science can explain
what that common stock is and why and how these germs retain those
peculiarities and tendencies, then the answer will be complete and not
until then. The Vedanta philosophy, however, has already explained the
cause of the potentiality in the germ of life or "germ-plasm" or
germ-cell.

Vedanta solves this difficulty by saying that each of these
germ-plasms or germ-cells is nothing but the subtle form of a
reincarnating individual, containing potentially all the experiences,
characters, tendencies, and desires which one had in one's previous
life. It existed before the birth of the body and it will continue
after the death of the body. This germ or subtle body is not the same
as the astral body of the Theosophists, or the double of the
metaphysical thinkers or the disembodied spirit of the Spiritualists;
but it is an ethereal center of activity-physical, mental and