eed might agree with.

Well, that is the kind of assertion which I want to make, as a working
hypothesis, concerning life.

An acorn has in itself the potentiality not of one oak-tree alone, but
of a forest of oak-trees, to the thousandth generation, and indeed of
oak-trees without end. There is no sort of law of "conservation" here.
It is not as if something were passed on from one thing to another. It
is not analogous to energy at all, it is analogous to the magnetism
which can be excited by any given magnet: the required energy, in both
cases, being extraneously supplied, and only transmuted into the
appropriate form by the guiding principle which controls the operation.

We do not know how to generate life without the action of antecedent
life at present, though that may be a discovery lying ready for us in
the future; but even if we did, it would still be true (as I think)
that the life was in some sense pre-existent, that it was not really
created _de novo_, that it was brought into actual practical every-day
existence doubtless, but that it had pre-existed in some sense too:
being called out, as it were, from some great reservoir or storehouse
of vitality, to which, when its earthly career is ended, it will
return.

Indeed, it cannot in any proper sense be said ever to have left that
storehouse, though it has been made to interact with the world for a
time; and, if we might so express it, it may be thought of as carrying
back with it, into the general reservoir, any individuality, and any
experience and training or development, which it can be thought of as
having acquired here. Such a statement as this last cannot be made of
magnetism, to which no known law of evolution and progress can be
supposed to apply; but of life, of anything subject to continuous
evolution or linear progress embodied in the race, of any condition not
cyclically determinate and returning into itself, but progressing and
advancing--acquiring fresh potentialities, fresh powers, fresh
beauties, new characteristics such as perhaps may never in the whole
universe have been displayed before--of everything which possesses such
powers as these, a statement akin to the above may certainly be made.
To all such things, when they reach a high enough stage, the ideas of
continued personality, of memory, of persistent individual existence,
not only may, but I think must, apply; notwithstanding the admitted
return of the individual after each incarn