MATTER LIVING AND NOT-LIVING. 727 



are the proximate cause of life the only cause, that is to say, which 

 the human intellect can grasp, and with which accordingly science has 

 to reckon. If we reject this conclusion, we reject with it the methods 

 of science, and along with these science itself. But science is our 

 chosen arbiter. 



Nothing in reality is lacking to crown the hypothesis with demon- 

 strative proof but to discover the law of co-operation of the physical 

 factors uniting in the production of life, and deduce the phenomena 

 from it ; although to furnish this may well tax the highest resources 

 of science for an indefinite future. And yet some happy feat of in- 

 duction or deduction, or of both combined, may furnish it to-morrow. 

 Meanwhile, the hypothesis as it stands, it is hardly too much to say, 

 exacts the acquiescence, if it does not secure the assent, of every mind 

 at once unbiased and not uninformed. The cause of life is known. 

 The law of the cause alone is unknown. This law, as to which no 

 hypothesis has yet been formulated, is strictly the only aspect of the 

 subject open to hypothesis ; so that, while the hypothesis supplied 

 has passed beyond the hypothetical stage, the hypothesis required has 

 not definitely reached it. In this logical interregnum, however, the 

 vacating hypothesis, obviously, must still rule the discussion. But 

 let us hear Dr. Beale. 



" Bear in mind," he admonishes us, " that no state of matter known, 

 no mere chemical combinations, no mechanical contrivances, no ma- 

 chinery ever made, can be caused to exhibit phenomena resembling in 

 any really essential particular those which are characteristic of every 

 form of living matter that exists in nature." This admonition may 

 be just, and I am disposed to think it is, if qualified by that reference 

 to " the present state of scientific knowledge " which the learned 

 professor often makes, but which he here apparently fails to " bear in 

 mind " ; yet, with this qualification, it is not indisputably just, seeing 

 that Dr. Bastian, one of the foremost experimenters of the age, con- 

 tends that he has surmounted the difficulty which Dr. Beale declares 

 to be an impossibility. Whether Dr. Bastian has achieved this result 

 or not, the impossibility of achieving it has not been proved ; on the 

 contrary, the possibility, with the advance of scientific knowledge, has 

 grown clearer. A few years ago, Dr. Beale might, with equal just- 

 ness, have delivered this same admonition to us in respect to organic 

 compounds of every sort ; but meanwhile chemistry, in the face of the 

 assumed impossibility of making any of them, has, in fact, made hun- 

 dreds of them, therein surpassing the creative power even of animal 

 life, which in general is powerless to form them, but appropriates 

 them ready made from the vegetable world, in which they are com- 

 pounded out of their elements ; and, if chemistry can produce organic 

 matter, it may, when further developed, produce organisms, or, what 

 would be of equal significance, formless protoplasm. It is on the way, 

 and pressing forward. While impossibilities, akin to Dr. Beale's pres- 



