HUXLEY, AND THE PROBLEM OF THE NATURALIST 41 



that the whole case is stated in the essay ? While clay is the 

 physical basis of the potter's art, its essence is fitness for the use 

 of man : and what concerns us is not that he uses clay, but that 

 he makes from it now a foundation-brick and now an ornamental 

 coping ; now a homely kitchen pot, and now a graceful urn. I 

 have studied your wonderful chronometers until I am 'able to 

 deduce the operations of a watch from the form of its parts and 

 the way they are put together * ; but I failed to understand them 

 until I perceived that relation between their movements and those 

 of the earth which constitutes their fitness for man's service. I 

 tried, long ago, to show that something very similar is true of living 

 things. We may sometime be able to foresee or deduce all their 

 actions from their structure, but at present, as in my own day, the 

 only available way to understand them is to study their relations 

 to the world around them. 



*' My teaching that the essence of a living being is not what it 

 is made of, or what it does, but why it does it, has been rendered 

 by one of your contemporaries into the statement that life is the 

 continuous adjustment between internal and external relations. 

 If this is true, is not the biology which restricts itself to the physical 

 basis, and forgets the external world, like your play of ' Hamlet ' 

 without the Hamlet t Is not the biological laboratory which leaves 

 out the ocean and the mountains and meadows a monstrous ab- 

 surdity } Was not the greatest scientific generalization of your 

 times reached independently by two men who were eminent in their 

 familiarity with living things in their homes } 



"You ask, 'What better philosophical status has vitality than 

 aquosity.?' — and I ask you in turn what better status has voli- 

 tion than vitality.? — yet you find the employment of this word 

 'both useful and justifiable.' You can separate water into its 

 elements and then, by recombining them, you can get water again ; 

 and this you may repeat as often as you choose ; but can you, as 

 yet, do anything of the sort with living things } When by the 

 methods of the laboratory you have made a living being; when 

 you have made not merely protoplasm, — nor even protoplasm capa- 

 ble of nutrition, growth, reproduction, and contraction, — but proto- 

 plasm able to maintain persistent adjustment to the shifting world 

 around it, — then, and not till then, will I admit that my word 



