PROFESSOR VIRCHOW AND EVOLUTION. 377 



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 

 aui generis, distinct from matter, and incapable of 

 being generated out of matter. Hence the obvious in- 

 ference 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 proto- 

 plasm 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. 



That ' matter is not itself alive ' Professor Knight 

 seems to regard as an axiomatic truth. Let us place in 

 contrast with this the notion entertained by the philo- 

 sopher Ueberweg, one of the subtlest heads that Ger- 

 many has produced. * What occurs in the brain ' says 

 Ueberweg * would, in my opinion, not be possible, if the 

 process which here appears in its greatest concentration 

 did not obtain generally, only in a vastly diminished 

 degree. Take a pair of mice and a cask of flour. By 

 copious nourishment the animals increase and multiply, 

 and in the same proportion sensations and feelings aug- 



