Loe raamatut: «King Solomon's Goat», lehekülg 10

THE BIOGRAPHY OF THE SOUL ATOM.
By Willard Bartlett.
From The Nautilus

I will preface my story with the simple statement that I am now 500,000,000 years old, more or less, that the atom in which my soul is located, or which constitutes my soul, first found a home in what is called a living being, a cytod or cell, in the primordial or earliest epoch of earth’s history. A cell is a minute mass of living protoplasm, or jelly-like substance, not as large as the head of a pin, a combination of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, ammonia, sulphur, etc. While it is true that I existed before that, and, in fact, from all eternity, I previously resided in what is called inanimate matter, in the igneous rocks. But we will say that I was born when my soul atom became involved in the said protoplasm of one of the earliest plant cells.

All matter is endowed with mind, and a soul exists in every atom. It is impossible to produce new life, as it is said scientists have done, and impossible to create life, as God is claimed to have done, for life always existed in every atom. It is by certain combinations of matter that life becomes manifest in motion.

Each of the thousands of atoms, of which said primitive life cell was composed, had a soul destined to take its place in some descendant, if it had an opportunity. And the souls are waiting in the atoms to be born, and not in Heaven as asserted by the Yogi philosophers. The Yogis claim that the souls are waiting in some department of the Buddhist heaven crying to be born. Bosh! They are waiting in the spermatozoa, those little monsters, those little devils that drive their great human masters to crime and murder, to the gallows and the stake; there they are howling to be born. In their frantic race to enter the ovum, as shown under “Spermatozoa,” Stand. Dic., no wonder they are excited. They have been waiting 500,000,000 years for the opportunity to become human beings.

Cells propagate by division; that is my original ancestor, a little, round mass of protoplasm, divided itself into two cells to produce offspring, and all of my ancestors have done the same through all these millions of years, consequently I have in my body, in all of the cells, some of the original matter of which my original cell ancestor was composed. That is eternity’s great highway by which the soul walked down.

The human germ cell divides in the same manner into two individuals and we propagate, as our earliest ancestors did, by casting off a cell, which, being joined by a cell of the opposite sex, becomes fertilized. The human embryo develops by repeated subdivisions of this twin cell, and each one of the myriads of cells so produced is a living, thinking being.

The question has arisen why the cells in an embryo arrange themselves in the form of the parent, and it has been asserted that they are so distributed by God in pursuance of a Divine plan. But it is actually done by the volition of the cells themselves. Each cell takes its proper position in compliance with the instruction of its parent cell, and if removed by force to some other part of the embryo, will return to its original place, thus evincing the most surprising intelligence. It must be remembered that a molecule is as large as a universe, that there is no such thing as size, that as much ability may be stored up in the nerve centre of a cell as in all the debris of a human brain.

We are immortal, but with no memory of past lives. If we do not propagate, this life will be the end of our line that has continued unbroken for millions of years, and we will have to go back into the abysmal void, into the womb of chaos and commence all over again. That will be our fate in any case. Only that cell of our bodies which may be incorporated in our progeny will continue in human form. That cell is a remote relative of ours, having descended from the ancestral germ cell from which our embryo was developed.

Of the earliest plant cells, developed by spontaneous generation in the primordial epoch, some developed tails, or projected filaments of protoplasm from their jelly-like bodies. With these tails they propelled themselves through the primeval seas, and thus separated themselves from the plants and became animals. In this earliest epoch of life’s history all beings lived in the water. These primitive plants possessed as much soul and mind as the animals that thus branched off from them, and all plants still possess soul and mind.

But I am sorry to say that my ancestor, who thus projected a tail and became an animal, was a degenerate, a lazy loafer, a robber, a murderer and a cannibal. We all have to live on protoplasm. The plants made their own living plasm, manufacturing it from inorganic matter, but the animals were too indolent to do such laborious work, when they could just as well kill and eat the plant cells and subsist on them. In this way they lost the recipe for making plasm, and we descendants are consequently born cannibals, condemned to rob, murder, despoil and eat our fellow beings, or starve.

My next beautiful ancestor, to whom I will introduce you, was an animal consisting of numerous cells arranged in the form of a sack or stomach, called a blastoderm or gastraea. There was no central brain at this time, each cell having a brain of its own.

Yesterday, while patrolling my beat down in the mine, in a drift in the limestone, the earliest sedimentary deposit laid down on the bed of the primeval ocean, I found the house of my archaic ancestor, willed to me by him millions of years ago, and delivered by him to me yesterday. It is a minute shell, with which he protected his precious stomach. This stomach took its flight to Heaven in the earliest dawn of time, but the house, one of the many mansions of the soul, preserved intact came down to me through unnumbered ages, while myriad races came into being and faded into eternity, and religions sprang up and flourished and waned, and empires rose and rotted and fell.

In the next stage, the stomach has become elongated, and the nerve centre or spinal cord makes its appearance along the whole length of the body. At this period my beloved grandfather was a very aristocratic and exclusive worm, belonging to one of the first families, and, like them, had as much brains in his tail as in his head, for no cranial brain had yet developed.

The remaining steps of the evolution, through which my ancestors have passed, are depicted in the development of the human embryo, and I will ask you to read up on the subject of embryology, which I have found quite as interesting as dime novels.