Everything there might be inert towards everything else, and
refuse to propagate its influence. Or gross mechanical influences
might pass, but no chemical action. Such worlds would be far less
unified than ours. Again there might be complete physico-chemical
interaction, but no minds; or minds, but altogether private ones,
with no social life; or social life limited to acquaintance, but no
love; or love, but no customs or institutions that should
systematize it. No one of these grades of universe would be
absolutely irrational or disintegrated, inferior tho it might appear
when looked at from the higher grades. For instance, if our minds
should ever become 'telepathically' connected, so that we knew
immediately, or could under certain conditions know immediately,
each what the other was thinking, the world we now live in would
appear to the thinkers in that world to have been of an inferior
grade.
With the whole of past eternity open for our conjectures to range
in, it may be lawful to wonder whether the various kinds of union
now realized in the universe that we inhabit may not possibly have
been successively evolved after the fashion in which we now see
human systems evolving in consequence of human needs.
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