fter all, may be simply a bad
habit Life will succeed in shaking off. No philosophy or religion can
afford to be anthropocentric merely. It must include all life and all
living things to which we are blood-related. There are other species
or latent species to take up the torch that burned poor homo sapiens
and ascend the heights. The ant and bee may yet mutate along certain
lines that would make them the masters of the universe.

But no matter what species or variety gets the upper hand in the
struggle for survival and power, the implications of the qualities
necessary to victory in conflicts of individual separate pieces of
protoplasm will be there. Besides, life is always begotten of life.
That is why synthetic protoplasm is nothing but a phrase. It is
impossible to conceive of something alive, possessed of the property
of remembering, that is not possessed of a store of past experiences.
You can no more think of getting rid of these unconscious memories of
protoplasm than you can think of getting rid of the wetness of water.
They are imbedded in the most intimate chemistry of the primeval ameba
as well as in our most complex tissues.

The memories of the cold lone fish and the hot predatory carnivor who
were our begetters, may haunt us to the end of time. The bee and the
ant, too, have woven inextricably into the woof of their cells the
instincts that sooner or later would send their brain ganglia,
even when evolved to the pitch of perfection, to elaborating the
self-and-species murdering inventions and discoveries that are
apparently destined to slay us. The powers of unconscious memory and
unlearnable technique of reaction to experience, once grooved, thus
prove the great gift and the eternal curse of protoplasm. Making it
possible for it to be and become what it is and has, they have
also made it forever impossible for it to be or become its own
contradiction.

Add to this unsloughable remembrance of the past, for better, for
worse, the secretive consciousness of its present needs every living
thing, as against every other living thing, is obsessed with. As a
peregrinating, finite, spatially limited being, it is separated from
all other living beings by inorganic, dead masses, and yet driven to
contact with them by a fundamental impulse to assimilate them into
itself, and make them part of itself. That assimilatory urge is
present in every activity from coarse ingestion as food to the moral
metabolism of the h