028 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 
argument in Young's "Night Thoughts" will occur to 
most readers: 
Who Motion foreign to the smallest grain 
Shot through vast masses of enormous weight? 
Who bid brute Matter's restive lump assume 
Such various forms, and gave it wings to fly? 
Against this notion of Descartes the great deist John 
Toland, whose ashes lie unmarked in Putney churchyard, 
strenuously contended. He affirmed motion to be an 
inherent attribute of matter that no portion of matter 
was at rest, and that even the most quiescent solids were 
animated by a motion of their ultimate particles. The 
success of his contention, according to the learned and 
laborious Dr. Berthold,* entitles Toland to be regarded as 
the founder of that monistic doctrine which is now so 
rapidly spreading. 
It seems to me that the idea of vitality entertained in 
our day by Professor Knight, closely resembles the idea of 
motion entertained by his opponents in Toland's day. 
Motion was then virtually asserted to be a thing sui generis, 
distinct from matter, and incapable of being generated out 
of matter. Hence the obvious inference when matter was 
observed to move. It was the vehicle of an energy not its 
own the repository of forces impressed on it from without 
the purely passive recipient of the shock of the 
Divine. The logical form continues, but the subject- 
matter is changed. " The evolution of nature/' says 
Professor Knight, "may be a fact; a daily and hourly 
apocalypse. But we have no evidence of the non-vital 
passing into the vital. Spontaneous generation is, as yet, 
an imaginative guess, unverified by scientific tests. And 
matter is not itself alive. Vitality, whether seen in a single 
cell of protoplasm or in the human brain, is a thing sui 
generis, distinct from matter, and incapable of being 
generated out of matter." It may be, however, that in 
process of time, vitality will follow the example of motion, 
and, after the necessary antecedent wrangling, take its 
place among the attributes of that " universal mother " 
who has been so often misdefined. 
* " John Toland und der Monismus der Gegenwart," Heidelberg, 
Carl Winter. 
