ms are
absolutely necessary as a basis for the higher, and that the higher
forms cannot arrive except by building up and giving additional
development to the lower? In other words, the present status of
humanity above the animal kingdom was attained not by a sudden burst
of creative power, making a distinct and isolated being, but by the
gradual and consecutive influx, which evolved new faculties and
organs,--a process called _evolution_. How slow or how rapid this
process may have been, science has not yet determined; but it would
require incalculable millions of years if nothing but the common
exciting effects of environment and necessity have been operative in
evolution; and science has utterly failed to discover any power which
could carry on development so effectively as to produce an entire
transformation of species, and overcome the vast differences between
the oyster and the bird, the fish and the elephant.

But as such transmutations of the nervous system do virtually occur in
man before birth, we cannot say that they are _impossible_, for that
which occurs in the womb under the influence of parental love may also
occur in the womb of nature under the influence of Divine love; for
love is the creative power, and as the maternal influx may determine
the noble development of humanity or the ignoble development of
monsters and animalized beings, it is obvious that the formative stage
of all beings is a plasmic condition in which the most subtle or
spiritual influences may totally change their destiny and development.

That such an influx may come to exalt or to modify the animal type is
by no means unreasonable, for human beings in vast numbers are liable
to such influences from the unseen, which exert a controlling
influence, and many animals are as accessible to invisible influences
as man, while their embryos are vastly more so than the parents. If
then we recognize the spiritual being in man, and the same spiritual
being disembodied as a potential existence,--if, moreover, we
recognize the illimitable and incomprehensible psychical power behind
the universe, of which man is one expression, we cannot fail to see
that the embryonic development of animals from a lower to a higher
form is entirely possible and probable; and in the absence of any
other practicable method of evolution to higher types we are compelled
to adopt this as the most rational.

What is difficult or utterly impossible when we rely on phys