Embryo minds, like embryo bodies, pass through a number of strange
metamorphoses before they adopt their final shape. It is no more to be
wondered at that one who is going to turn out a Roman Catholic, should
have passed through the stages of being first a Methodist, and then a
free thinker, than that a man should at some former time have been a mere
cell, and later on an invertebrate animal. Ernest, however, could not be
expected to know this; embryos never do. Embryos think with each stage
of their development that they have now reached the only condition which
really suits them. This, they say, must certainly be their last,
inasmuch as its close will be so great a shock that nothing can survive
it. Every change is a shock; every shock is a _pro tanto_ death. What
we call death is only a shock great enough to destroy our power to
recognise a past and a present as resembling one another. It is the
making us consider the points of difference between our present and our
past greater than the points of resemblance, so that we can no longer
call the former of these two in any proper sense a continuation of the
second, but find it less trouble to think of it as something that we
choose to call new.
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