M ONER A, AND THE PROBLEM OF LIFE. 679 



posed the effortless contrivance and accomplishment of all that is so 

 laboriously painful, joyful, marvelous to us. 



This, in its best sense, means blind surrender of all knowledge to 

 implicit trust. But life, grown conscious amid incessant struggle and 

 remorseless fate, feels now sufficiently inured and emboldened not to 

 shrink from prying with utmost earnestness into the secret of its own 

 significance. It yearns to comprehend. 



However, one obstacle removed, another at once takes its place. 

 It so happens, namely, that we ourselves are most ingenious contrivers, 

 all of us inveterate mechanists from our birth, using with much advan- 

 tage things that already are. And, very likely, because of such uni- 

 versal human propensity, the advanced thinkers of our race conceive 

 that a chaos of some kind of original stuff must have served a similar 

 purpose to an infinitely mightier contriver, maker, Nature, or whatever 

 special appellation anthropomorphic or metaphysical predilection may 

 dictate for it. Poor philosophy this, that has to beg the entire ques- 

 tion. No, we are very far yet from having solved the riddle of final 

 causes and natural synthesis. We stand on the outside, perplexed as 

 ever, in spite of Hume's concentrative naturalism, and Kant's schools 

 of criticism and transcendentalism. No word of prophetic speech, or 

 weighing knowledge, has yet uttered the true meaning of things. Our 

 mind, with its shallow dip, emotional and mechanical, does but pierce 

 the rippling face of creative profundity. 



One point, however, one steadfast point, is everywhere discernible 

 among the phantasmal shifting of appearances and thoughts ; and this 

 one positive element of truth thus enunciates itself : Only by unremit- 

 ting, infinitely graduated, indwelling travail, does at all times the fruit 

 of existence receive its birth. The import of this guiding truth can be 

 but superficially reprojected and numerically symbolized by the recog- 

 nition of signs of inorganic evolution, and the heaping of ages upon 

 ages of geological time. Its real value can be realized only by the dis- 

 covery and penetration of its actual source of emanation organization. 



Perhaps our monera will materially assist us in gaining some esti- 

 mate of the potency of organization. In its adequate composition will 

 consist the arduous task of the philosophy of the future. 



The study of moneric protoplasm has disclosed that so-called con- 

 tractility is not merely a property of the living substance, but that it 

 is its function, stimulated by the dynamical influences of the medium, 

 and effected by means of chemical disintegration. The organic mole- 

 cule, before it experienced its chemical, its functional rupture, was held 

 together by the bond of inwrought chemical affinities. Now that dis- 

 association has been accomplished, these chemical affinities are left un- 

 satisfied. The disintegrated protoplasm forms but one complemental 

 part of a higher, most definite combination. If the other complemental 

 part should happen to be in readiness somewhere, and be brought, by 

 some means or other, into actual contact with the mutilated protoplasm, 



