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unitary or monistic conception of Nature, exactly the contrary is 
the case—all living matter has soul.* Far from believing in a raw 
and soulless matter, as our adversaries represent, we on the 
contrary are obliged to accept in all living matter, in all proto- 
plasm, the first elements of all soul-life: the simple form of 
sensations of the agreeable and disagreeable, the simple form of 
movements of attraction and repulsion. The steps, however, of 
the formation and constitution of this soul are different in the 
different living creatures, and carry us on gradually from the quiet 
cell-soul through a long series of ascending and intermediate steps, 
right up to the conscious and intelligent soul of man. 
Still less can we concede that the poetic and _ ideal 
conception of the world is endangered through our monistic 
development doctrine. No doubt we nowadays miss the 
nymphs and naiads, the dryads and oreads, with which the 
old Greek fountains and streams were alive, the woods and hills 
peopled. They have long ago vanished with the gods of Olympus, 
but in place of these man-like demigods, stand the countless 
elementary spirits of the ce//s. And if ever there were a conception 
in the highest degree poetical and at the same time true, it is cer- 
tainly the brilliant discovery—that in the smallest of little worms, 
and in the most invisible flowers, there live thousands of indepen- 
dent delicate souls; that in each of the single-celled microscopic 
infusoria an individual soul is active, just as much as in the blood 
cells which restlessly circle in our blood, in the brain cells which 
are elevated to the highest of all soul-offices—that of clear consci- 
ousness. From this point of view we see in the doctrine of the 
cell-soul the most important advance to the reconciliation of the 
idealist and the realist conceptions of Nature—the old and the new 
modes of regarding the universe. 
Thus ends the Essay; and now with your permission I 
should like to make a few brief remarks on it. 
* There may however be different £zds of psyche.—C. H. P. 
