268 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



of Genesis : " Profoundly interesting and indeed pathetic to me are 

 those attempts of the opening mind of man to appease its hunger for a 

 Cause. But the book of Genesis has no voice in scientific questions. 

 It is a poem, not a scientific treatise. In the former aspect it is for- 

 ever beautiful; in the latter it has been, and it w^ill continue to be, 

 purely obstructive and hurtful." My agreement with Prof. Knight 

 extends still further. " Does the vital," he asks, " proceed by a still 

 remoter development from the non-vital ? Or was it created by a fiat 

 of volition ? Or " — and here he emphasizes his question — " has it 

 always existed in some form or other as an eternal constituent of the 

 universe? I do not see," he replies, "how we can escape from the 

 last alternative." With the whole force of my conviction I say, " Nor 

 do I ; " though my mode of regarding the " eternal constituent " might 

 diflPer from that of Prof. Knight. 



When matter was defined by Descartes, he deliberately excluded 

 the idea of force or motion from its attributes and from his definition. 

 Extension only was taken into account. And, inasmuch as the impo- 

 tence of matter to generate motion was assumed, its observed motions 

 were referred to an external cause. God, resident outside of matter, 

 gave the impulse. In this coiuiection the argument in Young's " Night 

 Thoughts " will occur to most readers : 



"Who Motion foreign to the smallest grain 

 Shot through vast masses of enormous weight? 

 "Who bid brute Matter's restive lump assume 

 Such various forms, and gave it wings to fly? " 



Against this notion of Descartes the great deist John Toland, whose 

 ashes lie unmarked in Putney Churchyard, strenuously contended. He 

 affirmed motion to be an inherent attribute of matter — that no portion 

 of matter was at rest, and that even the most quiescent solids were ani- 

 mated by a motion of their ultimate particles. It seems to me that the 

 idea of vitality entertained in our daj^ by Prof. Knight closely resem- 

 bles the idea of motion entertained by his opponents in Toland's day. 

 Motion was then virtually asserted to be a thing sui generis, distinct 

 from matter, and incapable of being generated out of matter. Hence 

 the obvious inference when matter was observed to move. It was the 

 vehicle of an energy not its own — the repository of forces impressed 

 on it from without — the purely passive recipient of the shock of the 

 Divine. The form of logic continues, but the subject-matter is changed. 

 " The evolution of Nature," says Prof. Knight, " may be a fact ; a daily 

 and hourly apocalypse. But we have no evidence of the non-vital 

 passing into the vital. Spontaneous generation is, as yet, an imagi- 

 native guess, tmverified by scientific tests. And matter is not itself 

 alive. Vitality, whether seen in a single cell of protoplasm or in the 

 human brain, is a thing sid generis, distinct from matter, and incapable 

 of being generated out of matter." It may be, however, that, in pro- 



