Hawke at hand, so Pryer had everything his
own way.
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 freethinker, 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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