AUTHORITY AND FACT. 



they cannot support by evidence. Thus they appeal to the 

 shadow of an authority which they affect to despise. 



The real student has a right to require that scientific'doc- 

 trines which he is asked and expected to accept as true, 

 should be supported by facts, not by authority, by ten- 

 dencies, and by prophecies. In favour of regarding living 

 beings as mere machines, built by force alone, maintained 

 and preserved by force, and even created by force, very 

 positive statements have been made ; but these have been 

 for the most part supported By arguments which, however 

 ingenious, can scarcely be regarded as conclusive. Shall 

 then ever-changing scientific authority enforce thoughtful 

 men, students of nature, to believe and confess in spite of 

 all they have themselves observed to the contrary, that a 

 living, moving, growing thing is but a force-bred, force-im- 

 pelled machine, evolved from formless material by its own 

 forces an apparatus constructed by force, undirected by 

 intelligence a clock whose works have somehow crystal- 

 lised from a solution of undeveloped but potential clock- 

 plasm which has acquired by virtue of the material properties 

 of its primeval metallic atoms, the property of clock-multi- 

 plication ? 



Often, indeed, has been repeated the argument that as 

 all that can be obtained from living things consists of 

 material substances, living things, therefore, consist of 

 matter only, and the " life " manifested by them can only 

 be the ordinary forces of matter in some special form. But 

 every one must see that such a view applies to non-living 

 things and to dead things, as well as to living things, and 

 that by such a statement the real question at issue is only 

 evaded. We desire to learn, first what is the difference 



B 2 



