192 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



notion of conscious life coming out of it cannot be 

 formed by the mind. The argument placed in the 

 mouth of Bishop Butler suffices, in my opinion, to 

 crush all such materialism as this. Those, however, 

 who framed these definitions of matter were but partial 

 students. They were not biologists, but mathematicians, 

 whose labours referred only to such accidents and pro- 

 perties of matter as could be expressed in their formulae. 

 Their science was mechanical science, not the science of 

 life. With matter in its wholeness they never dealt ; 

 and, denuded by their imperfect definitions, ' the gentle 

 mother of all ' became the object of her children's 

 dread. Let us reverently, but honestly, look the ques- 

 tion in the face. Divorced from matter, where is life ? 

 Whatever our faith may say, our knowledge shows them 

 to be indissolubly joined. Every meal we eat, and 

 every cup we drink, illustrates the mysterious control of 

 Mind by Matter. 



On tracing the line of life backwards, we see it ap- 

 proaching more and more to what we call the purely 

 physical condition. We come at length to those organ- 

 isms which I have compared to drops of oil suspended 

 in a mixture of alcohol and water. We reach the pro- 

 togenes of Haeckel, in which we have ( a type distin- 

 guishable from a fragment of albumen only by its 

 finely granular character.' Can we pause here ? We 

 break a magnet, and find two poles in each of its frag- 

 ments. We continue the process of breaking ; but, 

 however small the parts, each carries with it, though 

 enfeebled, the polarity of the whole. And when we 

 can break no longer, we prolong the intellectual vision 

 to the polar molecules. Are we not urged to do some- 

 thing similar in the case of life ? Is there not a 

 temptation to close to some extent with Lucretius, 

 when he affirms that ' Nature is seen to do all things 



