As the solid inorganic kingdom supervened upon the gaseous (vestiges of
the old being, nevertheless, carried over into and still persisting in
the new) and as the organic kingdom supervened upon the inorganic
(vestiges of the old being, again, carried over into and still persisting
in the new) so a third kingdom is now in process of development, the
super-organic, of which we see the germs in the less practical and more
emotional side of our nature.
Man, for example, is the only creature that interests himself in his own
past, or forecasts his future to any considerable extent. This tendency
I would see as the monad of a new regime—a regime that will be no more
governed by the ideas and habits now prevailing among ourselves than we
are by those still obtaining among stones or water. Nevertheless, if a
man be shot out of a cannon, or fall from a great height, he is to all
intents and purposes a mere stone. Place anything in circumstances
entirely foreign to its immediate antecedents, and those antecedents
become non-existent to it, it returns to what it was before they existed,
to the last stage that it can recollect as at all analogous to its
present.