We also remark that while the motives by which individuals in the lowest stages are influenced are purely self regarding, they broaden as evolution goes on.  The word “self” ceases to be wholly personal, and begins to include subjects of affection and interest, and these become increasingly numerous as intelligence and depth of character develop, and as civilisation extends.  The sacrifice of the personal desire for repose to the performance of domestic and social duties is an everyday event with us, and other sacrifices of the smaller to the larger self are by no means uncommon.  Life in general may be looked upon as a republic where the individuals are for the most part unconscious that while they are working for themselves they are also working for the public good.

We may freely confess ignorance of the outcome in the far future of that personal life to which we each cling passionately in the joyous morning of the affections, but which, as these and other interests fail, does not seem so eminently desirable in itself.  We know that organic life can hardly be expected to flourish on this earth of ours for so long a time as it has already existed, because the sun will in all probability have lost too much of its heat and light by then, and will have begun to grow dark and therefore cold, as other stars have done.  The conditions of existence here, which are now apparently in their prime, will have become rigorous and increasingly so, and there will be retrogression towards lower types, until the simplest form of life shall have wholly disappeared from the ice-bound surface.  The whole living world will then have waxed and waned like an individual life.

Neither can we discover whether organisms here are capable of attaining the average development of organisms in other of the planets that are probably circling round most of the myriads of stars, whose physical constitution, where-ever it has as yet been observed spectroscopically, does not differ much from that of our sun.  But we perceive around us a countless number of abortive seeds and germs; we find out of any group of a thousand men selected at random, some who are crippled, insane, idiotic, and otherwise born incurably imperfect in body or mind, and it is possible that this world may rank among other worlds as one of these.

We as yet understand nothing of the way in which our conscious selves are related to the separate lives of the billions of cells of which the body of each of us is composed.  We only know that the cells form a vast nation, some members of which are always dying and others growing to supply their places, and that the continual sequence of these multitudes of little lives has its outcome in the larger and conscious life of the man as a whole.  Our part in the universe may possibly in some distant way be analogous to that of the cells in an organised body, and our personalities may be the transient but essential elements of an immortal and cosmic mind.