That there are difficulties in the way of believing thus, I grant; that
there are impossibilities, I deny. Perhaps the first difficulty that
occurs is, the many forms of life which we cannot desire again to see.
But while we would gladly keep the perfected forms of the higher
animals, we may hope that those of many other kinds are as transitory as
their bodies, belonging but to a stage of development. All animal forms
tend to higher: why should not the individual, as well as the race, pass
through stages of ascent. If I have myself gone through each of the
typical forms of lower life on my way to the human--a supposition by
antenatal history rendered probable--and therefore may have passed
through any number of individual forms of life, I do not see why each of
the lower animals should not as well pass upward through a succession of
bettering embodiments. I grant that the theory requires another to
complement it; namely, that those men and women, who do not even
approximately fulfil the conditions of their elevated rank, who will not
endeavour after the great human-divine idea, striving to ascend, are
sent away back down to that stage of development, say of fish or insect
or reptile, beyond which their moral nature has refused to advance. Who
has not seen or known men who _appeared_ not to have passed, or indeed
in some things to have approached the development of the more human of
the lower animals! Let those take care who look contemptuously upon the
animals, lest, in misusing one of them, they misuse some ancestor of
their own, sent back, as the one mercy for him, to reassume far past
forms and conditions--far past in physical, that is, but not in moral
development--and so have another opportunity of passing the
self-constituted barrier.
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