4o6 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



stretching cycles of years. The living organism is a going concern; 

 its accounts balance. 



Perhaps the greatest change of recent years in our picture of 

 protoplasm is that implied in the abandonment of the view that 

 it has a microscopically demonstrable structure, network-like, 

 fibrillar, or otherwise. The appearance of intricate structure has 

 often been seen under high magnification in fixed and stained 

 cells, and many beautiful drawings of the protoplasmic reticulum 

 have been published. But this microscopically demonstrable struc- 

 ture is an artefact; it does not exist in living cells; it can be mimicked 

 in white of egg. Protoplasm is a liquid emulsion, mostly consisting 

 of water; but it can be as firm as a jelly-fish is firm, and it can make 

 for itself a supporting framework. But when we speak of protoplasm 

 as structureless, we must hasten to add that it is a "film-pervaded 

 or film-partitioned system". The living cell is partitioned by 

 extremely deUcate films with diffusion-hindering properties, 

 which allow dissimilar chemical processes to occur in con- 

 tiguity; but these partitions are not usually demonstrable in 

 any direct way. 



Protoplasm as Psychoplasm. — So much then here for proto- 

 plasm as physical basis of life. So far we have been thinking of it 

 as the physical basis of physiological life. Yet since the germ-cells 

 and the fertilised ovum cannot but carry along with them, con- 

 cealed amid their simpler developmental potentialities, a psychic 

 life, up to the level of their species, we are thereby already thinking 

 of protoplasm as also the basis or bearer of psychical life. And if so, 

 after all our enumeration of physical and chemical processes and 

 physiological functions, there is no escape for us, as evolutionary 

 life-students, from also wondering and searching, as best we can, 

 for such plasm-elements and characters as must be already present, 

 however latent, in the very Amoeba or the ovum, and which bear the 

 promise and potency of psychic life; as from simplest irritability to 

 sensing, and thence beyond, even to complexest developments of 

 human faculties, and from vaguest contractility to highest deed. Here, 

 then, inevitably arises the conception of protoplasm as also some- 

 thing of psychoplasm, since bearing with it possibiHties of ever 

 fuller and completer evolution of life, and this in both its main 

 aspects, the organic and the psychic, in animals and in ourselves. 

 And since all the tissues of a developed animal body are more or 

 less in organic touch with its neural elements, as these with their 

 centres, we see no way of refusing to these their psychic tinge as 

 well. Does not this conception indeed aid us, as towards under- 

 standing the unified organisation of the body in health, the pain 

 and disease which arise with undue abatement of this unity, and 

 even the vis medicatrix Naturce in convalescence and recovery — 

 so plainly the renewal of unity of functioning, both organic and 



