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which did not transpire, nor has its name, so far as I am aware, been ever again mentioned.

So much for the conclusions in regard to the larger aspect of life taken as a whole which must follow from confining life to protoplasm; but there is another aspect-that, namely, which regards the individual. The inevitable consequences of confining life to the protoplasmic parts of the body were just as unexpected and unwelcome here as they had been with regard to life at large; for, as I have already pointed out, there is no drawing the line at protoplasm and resting at this point; nor yet at the next halting-point beyond; nor at the one beyond that. How often is this process to be repeated? and in what can it end but in the rehabilitation of the soul as an ethereal, spiritual, vital principle, apart from matter, which, nevertheless, it animates, vivifying the clay of our bodies?"No one who has followed the course either of biology or psychology during this century, and more especially during the last five-and-twenty years, will tolerate the reintroduction of the soul as something apart from the substratum in which both feeling and action must be held to inhere. The notion of matter being ever changed except by other matter in another state is so shocking to the intellectual conscience that it may be dismissed without discussion; yet if bathybius had not been promptly dealt with, it must have become apparent even to the British public that there were indeed but few steps from protoplasm, as the only living substance, to vital principle. Our biologists therefore stifled bathybius, perhaps with justice, certainly with prudence, and left protoplasm to its fate.

Any one who reads Professor Allman's address above referred to with due care will see that he was uneasy about protoplasm, even at the time of its greatest popularity. Professor Allman never says outright that the non-protoplasmic parts of the body are no more alive than chairs and tables are. He said what involved this as an inevitable consequence, and there can be no doubt that this is what he wanted to convey, but he never insisted on it with the out

spokenness and emphasis with which so startling a paradox should alone be offered us for acceptance; nor is it easy to believe that his reluctance to express his conclusion totidem verbis was not due to a sense that it might ere long prove more convenient not to have done so. When I advocated the theory of the livingness, or quasi-livingness of machines, in the chapters of Erewhon of which all else that I have written on biological subjects is a development, I took care that people should see the position in its extreme form; the nonlivingness of bodily organs is to the full as startling a paradox as the livingness of non-bodily ones, and we have a right to expect the fullest explicitness from those who advance it. Of course it must be borne in mind that a machine can only claim any appreciable even aroma of livingness so long as it is in actual use. In Erewhon I did not think it necessary to insist on this, and did not, indeed, yet fully know what I was driving at.

The same disposition to avoid committing themselves to the assertion that any part of the body is non-living may be observed in the writings of the other authorities upon protoplasm above referred to; I have searched all they said, and cannot find a single passage in which they declare even the osseous parts of a bone to be non-living, though this conclusion was the raison d'être of all they were saying and followed as an obvious inference. The reader will probably agree with me in thinking that such reticence can only have been due to a feeling that the ground was one on which it behoved them to walk circumspectly; they probably felt, after a vague, ill-defined fashion, that the more they reduced the body to mechanism the more they laid it open to an opponent to raise mechanism to the body; but, however this may be, they dropped protoplasm, as I have said, in some haste with the autumn of 1879.

CHAPTER TEN: THE ATTEMPT TO ELIMINATE MIND

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HAT, IT MAY BE ASKED, WERE OUR biologists really aiming at?-for men like Professor Huxley do not serve protoplasm for nought. They wanted a good many things, some of them more righteous than others, but all intelligible. Among the more lawful of their desires was a craving after a monistic conception of the universe. We all desire this; who can turn his thoughts to these matters at all and not instinctively lean towards the old conception of one supreme and ultimate essence as the source from which all things proceed and have proceeded, both now and ever? The most striking and apparently most stable theory of the last quarter of a century had been Sir William Grove's theory of the conservation of energy; and yet wherein is there any substantial difference between this recent outcome of modern amateur, and hence most sincere, science-pointing as it does to an imperishable, and as such unchangeable, and as such, again, for ever unknowable underlying substance the modes of which alone change-wherein, except in mere verbal costume, does this differ from the conclusions arrived at by the psalmist?

"Of old," he exclaims, "hast Thou laid the foundation of the earth; and the heavens are the work of Thy hands. They shall perish, but Thou shalt endure; yea, all of them shall wax old like a garment; as a vesture shalt Thou change them and they shall be changed; but Thou art the same, and Thy years shall have no end." i

I know not what theologians may think of this passage, but from a scientific point of view it is unassailable. So again, "O Lord," he exclaims, " Thou hast searched me out, and known me: Thou knowest my down-sitting and mine up-rising; Thou understandest my thoughts long before. Thou art about my path, and about my bed: and spiest out all my ways. For lo, there is not a word in my tongue but Thou, O Lord, knowest it altogether.... Whither shall I go, then, from Thy Spirit? Or whither shall I go, then, from Thy presence? If I climb up into heaven Thou art there:

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if I go down to hell, Thou art there also. If I take the wings of the morning, and remain in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there also shall Thy hand lead me and Thy right hand shall hold me. If I say, Peradventure the darkness shall cover me, then shall my night be turned to day. Yea, the darkness is no darkness with Thee, but . . . the darkness and light to Thee are both alike." 1

What convention or short cut can symbolize for us the results of laboured and complicated chains of reasoning or bring them more aptly and concisely home to us than the one supplied long since by the word God? What can approach more nearly to a rendering of that which cannot be rendered-the idea of an essence omnipresent in all things at all times everywhere in sky and earth and sea; ever changing, yet the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever; the ineffable contradiction in terms whose presence none can either ever enter, or ever escape? Or rather, what convention would have been more apt if it had not been lost sight of as a convention and come to be regarded as an idea in actual correspondence with a more or less knowable reality? A convention was converted into a fetish, and now that its worthlessness as a fetish is being generally felt, its great value as a hieroglyph or convention is in danger of being lost sight of. No doubt the psalmist was seeking for Sir William Grove's conception, if haply he might feel after it and find it, and assuredly it is not far from every one of us. But the course of true philosophy never did run smooth; no sooner have we fairly grasped the conception of a single eternal and for ever unknowable underlying substance, then we are faced by mind and matter.Long-standing ideas and current language alike lead us to see these as distinct things-mind being still commonly regarded as something that acts on body from without as the wind blows upon a leaf, and as no less an actual entity than the body. Neither body nor mind seems less essential to our existence than the other; not only do we feel this as regards our own existence, but 1 Ps. cxxxix, Prayer-book version.

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we feel it also as pervading the whole world of life; everywhere we see body and mind working together towards results that must be ascribed equally to both; but they are two, not one; if, then, we are to have our monistic conception, it would seem as though one of these must yield to the other; which, therefore, is it to be?

This is a very old question. Some, from time immemorial, have tried to get rid of matter by reducing it to a mere concept of the mind, and their followers have arrived at conclusions that may be logically irrefragable, but are as far removed from common sense as they are in accord with logic; at any rate they have failed to satisfy, and matter is no nearer being got rid of now than it was when the discussion first began. Others, again, have tried materialism, have declared the causative action of both thought and feeling to be deceptive, and posit matter obeying fixed laws of which thought and feeling must be admitted as concomitants, but with which they have no causal connection. The same thing has happened to these men as to their opponents; they made out an excellent case on paper, but thought and feeling still remain the mainsprings of action that they have been always held to be. We still say, "I gave him £5 because I felt pleased with him, and thought he would like it"; or, "I knocked him down because I felt angry, and thought I would teach him better manners." Omnipresent life and mind with appearances of brute non-livingness-which appearances are deceptive; this is one view. Omnipresent non-livingness or mechanism with appearances as though the mechanism were guided and controlled by thought-which appearances are deceptive; this is the other. Between these two views the slaves of logic have oscillated for centuries, and to all appearance will continue to oscillate for centuries more.

/People who think-as against those who feel and actwant hard and fast lines-without which, indeed, they cannot think at all; these lines are as it were steps cut on a slope of ice without which there would be no descending it. When

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