628 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



argument in Young's "Night Thoughts" will occur to 

 most readers: 



Who Motion foreign to the smallest grain 

 Shot through vast masses of enormous weight? 

 Who bid brute Matter's restive lump assume 

 Such various forms, and gave it wings to fly? 



Against this notion of Descartes the great deist John 

 Toland, whose ushes lie unmarked in Putney churchyard, 

 strenuously contended. He affirmed motion to be an 

 inherent attribute of mutter that no portion of matter 

 was at rest, and that even the most quiescent solids were 

 animated by a motion of their ultimate particles. The 

 success of his contention, according to the learned and 

 laborious Dr. Berthold,* entitles Toland to be regarded as 

 the founder of that monistic doctrine which is now so 

 rapidly spreading. 



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 sui generis, 

 distinct from matter, and incapable of being generated out 

 of matter. Hence the obvious inference 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 protoplasm 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. 



* " John Toland und der Monismus der Qegenwart," Heidelberg, 

 Carl Winter, 



