86 ( i 4 ) 



refuse to credit the constituents with the properties 

 here ? To the constituents of protoplasm, in truth, any 

 new element, named vitality, has no more been added, 

 than to the constituents of water any new element, 

 named aquosity. Nor is there any logical halting-place 

 between this conclusion and the further and final one : 

 That all vital action whatever, intellectual included, is 

 but the result of the molecular forces of the protoplasm 

 which displays it. 



These sentences will be acknowledged, I think, fairly 

 to represent Mr. Huxley's relative deliverances, and, 

 consequently, as I may be allowed to explain again, the 

 only important while much the larger part of the 

 whole essay. Mr. Huxley, that is, while devoting fifty 

 paragraphs to our physiological immersion in the " mate- 

 rialistic slough," grants but one-and twenty towards our 

 philosophical escape from it ; the fifty besides being, so 

 to speak, in reality the wind, and the one-and-twenty 

 only the whistle for it. What these latter say, in effect, 

 is no more than this, that, matter being known not in 

 itself but only in its qualities, and cause and effect not 

 in their nexus but only in their sequence, matter may 

 be spirit or spirit matter, cause effect or effect cause in 

 short, for aught that Mr. Huxley more than phenome- 

 nally knows, this may be that or that this, first second, 

 or second first, but the conclusion shall be this, that he 

 will lay out all our knowledge materially, and we may 

 lay out all our ignorance immaterially if we will. 

 Which reasoning and conclusion, I may merely remark, 

 come precisely to this : That Mr. Huxley who, hoping 

 yet to see each object (a pin, say) not in its qualities 

 but in itself, still, consistently antithetic, cannot believe 

 in the extinction of fire by water or of life by the rope, 



