92 BIOLOGICAL LECTURES. 



years ago as they are to-day, and will be the same a million years 

 to come ; and if one knew it to be a living thing now, he would 

 expect it to remain a living thing, and if it were conscious, that 

 it would continue to be conscious. Another important consid- 

 eration lies here. The so-called properties of matter are not 

 detachable from matter itself. One cannot separate heat or 

 weight or vitality from a mass of matter ; they are not entities, 

 they are qualities. Set a top spinning and how wonderfully 

 it behaves. It will stand on its point and hum, or sleep, as the 

 boys say; but touch it ever so gently, and how it will bound 

 away, and do the most unexpected things. It is the motion it 

 has which enables it to act thus, and one who did not know 

 that the sleeping top was in motion, and should notice what it 

 did on being touched, might fairly well think it had a spirit in 

 it. But no one can detach the spin from the top so that he 

 could hold the spin in one hand and the top in the other ; 

 neither if life be such a material property can it be detached 

 from what embodies it. If one ties to physics at all he must 

 not play fast and loose with it. It will not do to take this and 

 reject that because it does not meet our likes or wishes. There 

 is no evidence I am acquainted with that physics acts conjointly 

 with anything else. Whatever it does, it does on its own 

 responsibility, and the result is to be measured on its own 

 balance. This is equivalent to saying that the field of physics 

 is much broader than has been supposed. When Newton 

 lived, physics had to do only with the movements of large 

 bodies. In our time it has been carried down to atoms, and, as 

 I have said, the knowledge here gained has been not simply an 

 extension of the old, it has been revolutionary in its bearing on 

 all questions, and the glimpses it has given of present outlying 

 fields convinces one that there must soon come such a hegira 

 from the old schools of thought as has never been witnessed, 

 although the past thirty years shows that in the field of natural 

 history everybody has changed from a creationist to an evolution- 

 ist. But this has been only the beginning of the change, for 

 if that science was true that made such a change necessary, it 

 is also true that the same science will make needful other 

 changes in men's conceptions of what kind of a universe they 



