The next highest form among the mammals are known as the placentals, or those which bring forth mature young.  In this class are found the ant-eaters, sloth, manatee, the whale and porpoise, the horse, cow, sheep, and other hoofed animals; the elephant, seal, the dog, wolf, lion, tiger, and all flesh eating animals; the hares, rats, mice, and ail other gnawing animals; the bats, moles, and other insect-feeders; then come the great family of apes, from the small monkeys up to the orang-outang, chimpanzee, and other forms nearly approaching man.  And then comes the highest, Man, from the Kaffir, Bush-man, Cave-man, and Digger Indian, up through the many stages until the highest forms of our own race are reached.

From the Monera to Man is a long path, containing many stages, but it is a path including all the intermediate forms.  The Yogi Teachings hold to the theory of evolution, as maintained by modern Science, but it goes still further, for it holds not only that the physical forms are subject to the evolutionary process, but that also the “souls” embodied in these forms are subject to the evolutionary process.  In other words the Yogi Teachings hold that there is a twin-process of evolution under way, the main object of which is to develop “souls,” but which also finds it necessary to evolve higher and higher forms of physical bodies for these constantly advancing souls to occupy.

Let us take a hasty glance at the ascending forms of animal life, as they rise in the evolutionary scale.  By so doing we can witness the growth of the soul, within them, as manifested by the higher and higher physical forms which are used as channels of expression by the souls within.  Let us first study soul-evolution from the outer viewpoint, before we proceed to examine it from the inner.  By so doing we will have a fuller idea of the process than if we ignored the outer and proceed at once to the inner.  Despise not the outer form, for it has always been, and is now, the Temple of the Soul, which the latter is remodelling and rebuilding in order to accommodate its constantly increasing needs and demands.

Let us begin with the Protozoa, or one-celled forms—­the lowest form of animal life.  The lowest form of this lowest class is that remarkable creature that we have mentioned in previous lessons—­the Moneron.  This creature lives in water, the natural element in which organic life is believed to have had its beginning.  It is a very tiny, shapeless, colorless, slimy, sticky mass—­something like a tiny drop of glue—­alike all over and in its mass, and without organs or parts of any kind.  Some have claimed that below the field of the microscope there may be something like elementary organs in the Moneron, but so far as the human eye may discover there is no evidence of anything of the kind.  It has no organs or parts with which to perform particular functions, as is the case with the higher forms of life.  These functions, as you know, may be classed into three groups, i.e., nutrition, reproduction, and relation—­that is, the function of feeding, the function of reproducing its kind, and the function of receiving and responding to the impressions of the outside world.  All of these three classes of functions the Moneron performs—­but with any part of its body, or with all of it.