MATTER LIVING AND NOT-LIVING. 731 



such countless times, in such countless directions, within such count- 

 less chambers, passages, recesses, that no wonder the broadest and 

 loftiest intellect of our time, or of any time, stood baffled at the 

 threshold of the labyrinth until he had fashioned the clew of Evolution 

 to guide him through its windings ; but the step, though infinitely 

 multiplied, is one and the same, spanning ever the same fathomless 

 chasm, and the faculties which enable us to take it once render us 

 competent to repeat it indefinitely. We thread the maze by a devel- 

 oped use of the powers by which we enter it, treading always over, 

 but never into, the meshes of infinity. The real difficulty, as already 

 implied, is that our present knowledge and intellectual training do not 

 match the complexity of the higher phenomena, which, notwithstand- 

 ing their astounding complexity, differ from the lower only as a prob- 

 lem in the calculus differs from a sum in addition and subtraction. 

 Fundamentally, there is no difference in the phenomena, and no break : 

 all are interconnected by one unbroken chain of causation. As the 

 watch-maker is developed from primitive man, so is life developed 

 from primitive matter, and the gap between these is no more impas- 

 sable and no less than the gap between those, or, for that matter, than 

 between the simplest compound and its elements, or between the atoms 

 of the elements themselves. The interval in every case is essentially 

 identical. If it makes life mysterious, it makes mysterious every other 

 thread in the texture of things. The mystery is the same throughout ; 

 and so is the only explanation with which the wit of man can em- 

 broider the somber secret. 



Dr. Beale has nothing more to say with which we need concern 

 ourselves. He is, as I have said, a physician of eminence, and, I may 

 add, a microscopic observer of approved accuracy ; but as a philosoph- 

 ical critic he is not a success. I have treated him with courtesy, out 

 of respect for the proprieties of serious discussion rather than for his 

 deserts. The tone of his paper is not candid or respectful ; its spirit 

 is derisive ; and the body of it is composed chiefly of a tirade, not 

 conspicuous for judgment or comprehension, against the decay of 

 modern thought and the dogmatism of modern scientists, among whom 

 he generously singles out Professor Huxley as a scape-goat, and, lay- 

 ing both hands on his laureled head, confesses over him, with much 

 unction but no fair words, all the iniquities of the children of light, 

 and halloos him, crowned with the shining burden, into a land not in- 

 habited by members of the Victoria Institute. But all this I pass by. 

 It is tempting, I confess, but space or the lack of it, if nothing better, 

 delivers me from the temptation. On the title-page of Dr. Beale's 

 pamphlet is inscribed : " The New Materialism ; Dictatorial Scientific 

 Utterances, and the Decline of Thought." Of this inscription the 

 first part might stand, fitly enough, for the title proper, and the last 

 part for the characteristics of the paper, were it not that its "dictato- 

 rial utterances " happen not to be " scientific," and that its " thought " 



