is plan before him, striving with skillful manipulation to
perfect his work."[87]

Besides the fact, so luminously brought out here, that the artist is
distinct from the "semi-fluid globule" of protoplasm in which he works,
there is this other essential point to notice, that in all his "skillful
manipulation" the artist is not working at random, but according to law.
He has "his plan before him." In the zoological laboratory of Nature it
is not as in a workshop where a skilled artisan can turn his hand to
anything--where the same potter one day moulds a dog, the next a bird,
and the next a man. In Nature one potter is set apart to make each. It
is a more complete system of division of labor. One artist makes all the
dogs, another makes all the birds, a third makes all the men. Moreover,
each artist confines himself exclusively to working out his own plan. He
appears to have his own plan somehow stamped upon himself, and his work
is rigidly to reproduce himself.

The Scientific Law by which this takes place is the Law of Conformity to
Type. It is contained, to a large extent, in the ordinary Law of
Inheritance; or it may be considered as simply another way of stating
what Darwin calls the Laws of Unity of Type. Darwin defines it thus: "By
Unity of Type is meant that fundamental agreement in structure which we
see in organic beings of the same class, and which is quite independent
of their habits of life."[88] According to this law every living thing
that comes into the world is compelled to stamp upon its offspring the
image of itself. The dog, according to its type, produces a dog; the
bird a bird.

The artist who operates upon matter in this subtle way and carries out
this law is Life. There are a great many different kinds of Life. If one
might give the broader meaning to the words of the apostle: "All life is
not the same life. There is one kind of life of men, another life of
beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds." There is the Life, or
the Artist, or the Potter who segments the worm, the potter who forms
the dog, the potter who moulds the man.[89]

What goes on then in the animal kingdom is this--the Bird-Life seizes
upon the bird-germ and builds it up into a bird, the image of itself.
The Reptile Life seizes upon another germinal speck, assimilates
surrounding matter, and fashions it into a reptile. The Reptile-Life
thus simply makes an incarnation of itself. The visible bird is simply
an incarnation