The Message of Science. 55 



achievement than they wot of. For it does not follow 

 that the human intellect, composed of cell sentiences, can 

 always comprehend the outcome of its acts. The intel- 

 lect is not yet sufficiently consentient to perceive and 

 understand the deeper instinct of the component cells. 

 Instinct, of which we have heard so much, is the dimly 

 perceived motive and will of the cells. 



But, as has been said, an organization by consentient or 

 " protoplasmic " contact, human being to human being, is 

 impracticable under the laws of terrestrial matter and un- 

 desirable for ideal and economic reasons. We therefore 

 resort to a better kind of union and organization better 

 because it affords greater individual liberty, based on 

 intercommunication by the use of abstract signs and sym- 

 bols, and also impress the more ethereal states or modes of 

 matter into our service to accomplish intercourse ; so that 

 personal feeling and thought (which is the feeling of the 

 brain-cells) can be freely communicated from individual 

 to individual, as freely and intelligibly as if by contact of 

 protoplasmic filaments. Protozoons, indeed, might never 

 have united to form metazoons had they possessed any- 

 thing like human facilities for intercommunication. They 

 were dependent wholly on touch and feeling, and on this 

 sentient basis the animal organism, which we inherit, 

 grew up. 



The extent to which this humanly developed system of 

 intercommunication has progressed need not here be de- 



