138 ANDREWS. 



Response to environment in character of its own peculiar 

 intrinsic powers, — this is the power of the living substance; 

 and, to repeat a point of radical importance, that response is in 

 character rather than in kind. Sometimes these terms are 

 indeed interchangeable, as when transmissory or sensory areas 

 react to stimulus of activity, as contractility or irritability, of 

 other areas of the living substance. To light, to heat, to 

 impact, to chemical contact, the substance still makes response 

 in character, over and above the immediate physical and 

 chemical reactions which its physical form and chemical consti- 

 tution necessitate. I have shown that we have at present no 

 right to carry these conditionings so far as to make of this 

 statement a petitio principii. 



[135] There is now for us a living, irritable, continuous 

 substance of a protoplasmic foam; and there is its environment, 

 internal and external; and these two sets of facts must at all 

 times in our thought of them, as they are in fact, be kept within 

 touch of each other, — never quite separable, yet wholly dis- 

 tinct. It is the living substance in reaction to environment 

 which has made and is still making the whole history of 

 organic creation, — the substance's response to environmental 

 conditions being always in character rather than in kind. 



[136] That standpoint which should regard animals or or- 

 ganisms as disjunctive portions of an historically continuous 

 substance — continuous in three dimensions of space, however, 

 not in two; — which should use interaction to internal environ- 

 ment to throw light on interaction of the same substance with 

 external environment; which should in short read the phenomena 

 of the organism to interpret phenomena of the substance, and 

 use these to illuminate those; seems to me the most reasonable. 

 The fact that our eyes look out rather than in, together with 

 great defects of our optical tools, and the general opacity of 

 living masses, have long withheld us from this point of view. 



[137] The substance both as organism, and as substance 

 organ, secures so far as may be that which is needful for its 

 energies down to its smallest pellicular subdivisions; and that 

 substance as organism which has best cared for the substance 

 as such, which has best borne neglect or privation inflicted 



