And so there go by the board the last alleviations of those unbeatable optimists who would soothe their aching souls with at least the drop of comfort:  that if man is a mortal species, with not the slightest prospect of a continuing immortality, not to mention a glorious future and destiny, there are others.  Man, after 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 hermit-saint who would influence others to do as he.

FATE AND ANTI-FATE