Then I spoke again, in this relation, of changing standards of good and bad, how what was right for an animal, for the lobster, for instance, was wrong for us. I showed them how all animals were selfish, and had to be selfish and self-evolving alone; how we had to be unselfish only because we realized how vast we were. Marian spoke again of the criminal. She said: “If he were behind us, he, from his own point of view, would not be bad.”
“But he would have to be punished,” said Ruth, “and made to be good.”
“Yes,” I answered, “for he is human, and we expect human actions of him. But we would not dare to blame him.”
Henry said we would punish him not as a punishment to hurt him, but to teach him.
We spoke again of diversity as necessary to comprehension, to understanding. I told them I had a whimsical fancy that the first one-celled creature divided because it wanted company. If creatures never divided, and became different, they certainly could never understand each other. Marian said:
“I see now. It is like a girl who had always lived in her own family and developed pretty well there, but the more different people she met the better she would develop.”
“Yes,” I answered, “unlikeness gives us recognition.”
Virginia said: “If we were all one self, life would be uninteresting.”
“Yes,” said I, “but we might reach a self-conscious self which is unthinkable to us now. There is one way, however, in which evolution helps us, and that is such an obvious way that none of you has thought of it.”
For a moment they were puzzled. Then Alfred said: “It is that we are really all one self.”
“Yes,” I answered, “it is that we are all physically related with all life.”
Then I went on to say that no one knew how life began, that there were theories, but they might be no better than fairy tales. They wanted to hear some. I said:
“One theory is that life is eternal in the shape of life-germs, or organic matter, and that these pass from planet to planet throughout the ether forever. But it is only a theory, and a doubtful one.”
I said I thought beginnings concerned us no more than ends, that all things, histories, science, knowledge, theories concerned us only in so far as they helped us to understand, as they served the large aim of life and showed us how to go. I made Henry repeat again that the aim of life was complete understanding. I said: “To me it is like a measure by which I measure and value all things.” We tried to measure various things by it, such as the relative advancement of monkeys, birds and ants, and the greatness of Napoleon and Shakespeare. We came to few conclusions, except that the love of man made man lovable, and that Shakespeare must have been a lover of men.