e., the three successive stages passed by the
spiritual impulse (through the elementals--of which little is permitted
to be said) before they are imprisoned in the most concrete form of
matter; and a, b, c, on the right-hand side, are the three stages of
organic life, vegetable, animal, human. What is total obscuration of
spirit is complete perfection of its polar antithesis--matter; and this
idea is conveyed in the lines A D and D A. The arrows show the line of
travel of the evolutionary impulse in entering its vortex and expanding
again into the subjectivity of the ABSOLUTE. The central thickest line,
d d, is the Mineral Kingdom.
The monogenists have had their day. Even believers in a personal god,
like Professor Agassiz, teach now that, "There is a manifest progress in
the succession of beings on the surface of the earth. The progress
consists in an increasing similarity of the living fauna, and among the
vertebrates especially, in the increasing resemblance to man. Man is
the end towards which all the animal creation has tended from the first
appearance of the first Palaeozoic fishes" ("Principles of Zoology," pp.
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