348 THE GRAMMAR OF SCIENCE 



in passing through our atmosphere, together with the 

 probabiHty that they are fragments of azoic rather than 

 zoic bodies — does not allow of much significance being 

 attributed to this pleasant conceit. The perpetuity of 

 life seems to involve the conception of forms of life 

 anterior to the protoplasmic grain and capable of with- 

 standing an environment totally unlike what protoplasm 

 as we know it can endure. Now it is highly probable 

 that protoplasm itself must be conceived as having had 

 a long development anterior to any stage in which we 

 at present find it. The steps of this development may 

 have been eliminated in the struggle for existence, or they 

 may have been peculiar to conditions of moisture and 

 temperature which have long passed away on our earth. 

 We might, perhaps, be forced to conceive them as imper- 

 ceptible like the atom, or, indeed, as indistinguishable from 

 inorganic substance, which would lead us remarkably close 

 to the second hypothesis of spontaneous generation. 



This theory of the perpetuity of life, we must remember, 

 is stated in purely conceptual language. As " eternity " 

 is a meaningless term in the perceptual universe of physi- 

 cal phenomena, so it must be in the perceptual universe 

 of biological phenomena. Time is a mode of distinguish- 

 ing our sense-impressions, and it extends only so far as 

 we have sense-impressions to distinguish (p. 185). The 

 perpetuity of some primitive life unit is therefore a pure 

 conception which, like that of the indestructibility of the 

 atom (p. 254), helps us to classify and describe our 

 perceptual experience, but for which it is meaningless to 

 assert any phenomenal reality. 



The perpetuity of life, however, involves some rather 

 extensive inferences — in particular, that life in its earliest 

 protoplasmic forms (which we must conceive to have 

 resembled in many respects existing protoplasm) was yet 

 capable of subsisting under a totally unlike environment,-^ 

 an environment in which only what we term inorganic 

 substances have hitherto been perceived to exist. Such 

 an hypothesis must accordingly be less adequate than any 

 1 Compare the Second Canon of Logical Inference (p. 60). 



