2O Natural Salvation. 



Indeed, the truer view of this great question is probably 

 that life finds but an irregular, erratic expression in the 

 superficies of the terrestrial globe, where gravity and the 

 grosser modes of universal energy prevail as a rule. 

 Yet the conception will be found to grow in the mind of 

 the student of living matter, that this wonderful static 

 property is a very universal property ; in a word, that all 

 matter is sentient at bottom ; and that its apparent insen- 

 tience, or lifelessness and inertia, as seen on the earth, is 

 less a natural than an unnatural and fortuitous condition 

 into which it has fallen from the peculiar recoils incident 

 to planetary formation. 



This view need not incline the student to entertain 

 pantheistic conceptions of matter, or drift away to extreme 

 opinions as to a universal mind inherent in nature : an 

 ocean of omniscient intellect, from which our "souls " are 

 stray driblets. On the contrary, the entire trend and 

 drift of biological science are to the effect that the primary 

 static property of matter is sentience only in the sense 

 that the raw flax is damask, that the crude ore is a 

 steel warship, and that in the great tracts of universal 

 matter there is nothing more intelligent than the elements 

 of intelligence; even as in "protoplasm" of lowly grade 

 there is little save the capacity to feel. Be it remem- 

 bered, too, that there is now, probably, no "protoplasm" 

 existent on the earth's surface of such lowly grade, 

 such archaic simplicity upon the scale of intelligence, as 



