Scientific Sophisms. 127 



acquired, except by exercising them before it 

 had acquired them. That, absolutely inert as it 

 was, it yet made this impossible exertion ; and, 

 lifeless as it was, it created life. 



To reject incredible absurdities like these is 

 to admit that originally protoplasm must have 

 been produced by life not previously embodied ; 

 but to admit this and yet to suppose that when, 

 vis now, embodied life is observed to give birth 

 to new embodiments, the operative force be- 

 longs not to the life itself, but to its protoplas- 

 mic embodiment is " much the same as to sup- 

 pose that when a tailor, dressed in clothes of 

 nis own making, makes a second suit of clothes, 

 this latter is the product not of the tailor him- 

 self, hut of the clothes he is wearing." 1 Life 

 therefore is not a product of protoplasm. 



d Nor is it a property of protoplasm. 



By the property of an object is meant, in 

 scientific speech, not merely something belong- 

 ing to the object, but also that it is a thing 

 without which the object could not subsist. 

 Thus, fluidity, solidity, and vaporisation are 

 " properties " of water, because matter which 

 did not liquefy, congeal, and evaporate at 



1 " Old-fashioned Ethics, and Common-sense Meta- 

 physics." By William Thomas Thornton, Macmillan, 

 1873, chap. iv. p. 167. (" Huxleyism.") 



