THE LIVING SUBSTANCE. 



123 



use in their daily life, and such as conjurors make use of in 

 their sleight of hand and second-sight tricks; he will gain for 

 some time to come more knowledge of the living substance as 

 such than if he applied the whole weight of historical and con- 

 ceptive training to bear on the difficulties. There is to be 

 seen amongst expert manual labour and the expert knowledge 

 gained in the mercantile business of the world, a far higher 

 and more delicate cultivation of the perceptions necessary for 

 just this work than is to be found among scientific men who 

 have spent years in so-called laboratory training. 



If after his perfecting, so far as possible, these animal 

 faculties the biologist finds himself seemingly as far as ever 

 from the goal of perfect grasp of the ways and expressions of 

 the living substance as such; he has only to recall how difficult 

 it is for him to follow the gross movements of whole and large 

 organisms across large spaces, — the utter baffling of his keen- 

 est attention which is possible to human hands, arms, or even 

 a whole body. Thus he will regain a large patience with his 

 defeat and be content to serve seven years to learn more of 

 the movements and habits of the living substance as such. 

 He will then learn how strong, how yielding; how bond, how 

 free; that substance is; how seemingly wayward, and yet to 

 the limit of our opportunities of knowing it, an expression of 

 disciplined and unified results, sympathetic to the sum of past 

 experiences, — prophetic of the sum of life yet unlived. 



[115] To concern oneself much with the living substance as 

 such; with the habit of the substance, rather than its form; to 

 see, to understand, how the substance expresses itself in rela- 

 tion to its environment, both general and specific; to follow it 

 in its complex action and reaction ; to learn how it uses, rejects, 

 transcends, or passively protects itself against external condi- 

 tions; and how it bends itself before these in order to conquer 

 by a magnificent "jiujutsu": this seems to me the true bio- 

 logical standpoint, for it is the standpoint of the living substance 

 as such, — it is the working standpoint of nature. 



