178 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



the antipodes of heaven. It may seem a small thing to admit 

 that the dull vital actions of a fungus or a foraminifer are the 

 properties of their protoplasm, and are the direct results of the 

 nature of the matter of which they are composed. But if, as I 

 have endeavoured to prove to you, their protoplasm is essentially 

 identical with, and most readily converted into, that of any 

 animal, I can discover no logical halting-place between the 

 admission that such is the case and the further concession that 

 all vital action may, with equal propriety, be said to be the 

 result of the molecular forces of the protoplasm which displays 

 it. And if so, it must be true, in the same sense and to the same 

 extent, that the thoughts to which I am now giving utterance, 

 and your thoughts regarding them, are the expression of mole- 

 cular changes in that matter of life which is the source of our 

 other vital phenomena. 



This uncompromising, virile attitude towards this most 

 difficult and stupendous problem of science is characteristic 

 both of the man and of the time. Huxley wrote in 1868 at 

 the zenith of a period of strenuous intellectual life without 

 doubt unsurpassed in the history of the world. The strong 

 new wine of scientific discovery was running in men's veins. 



A mere chronological table of the chief scientific events 

 shows how fast was the growth. In the forties the labours 

 of Joule provided a basis for the conception of the conservation 

 of energy which at a step unified all the sciences. In the 

 forties, too, the unification of the biological sciences was begun 

 by the recognition of the cell as the unit of all life, and of the 

 glutinous sarcode as its physical basis, and was crowned by 

 the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859, which gave 

 force and authority to the older doctrine of the continuous 

 development and progression of life. 



The spirit of the age was one of conflict, and men's minds 

 were tuned by it to Pisgah-like visions of the country to be 

 conquered. The ideal of the new learning was the unity of all 

 knowledge, its quest the establishment of a scheme of things 

 animate and inanimate which should show them, linked together, 

 without break, in orderly progress from the simple to the 

 complex, from the lower to the higher, and its duty the war- 

 fare against a piecemeal and partial outlook of separate creation 

 and catastrophic change. For the new learning no one did battle 

 more strenuously than did Huxley. 



The doctrine of the unity of knowledge and experience is not 

 an easy one ; it is justified even now rather by the steady trend 



