A BIRD OF PASSAGE 



is still a mystery that defies us. Cause and effect 

 meet and are lost in each other. Science cannot ad- 

 mit a miracle, or a break in the continuity of life, yet 

 here it reaches a point where no step can be taken. 

 Huxley's illustrations do not help his argument. 

 "Protoplasm," he says, "is the clay of the potter; 

 which, bake it and paint it as he will, remains clay, 

 separated by artifice, and not by nature, from the 

 commonest brick or sun-dried clod." Clay is cer- 

 tainly the physical basis of the potter's art, but 

 would there be any pottery in the world if it con- 

 tained only clay? Do we not have to think of the 

 potter? In the same way, do we not have to think 

 of something that fashions these myriad forms of 

 life out of protoplasm? — and back of that, of some- 

 thing that begat protoplasm out of non-protoplas- 

 mic matter, and started the flame of life going? 

 Life accounts for protoplasm, but what accounts for 

 life? We have to think of the living clay as sepa- 

 rated by Nature from the inert "sun-dried clod." 

 There is something in the one that is not in the 

 other. There is really no authentic analogy between 

 the potter's art and Nature's art of life. 



The force of the analogy, if it has any, drives us 

 to the conclusion that life is an entity, or an agent, 

 working upon matter and independent of it. 



There is more wit than science in Huxley's ques- 

 tion, "What better philosophical status has vital- 

 ity than aquosity?" There is at least this differ- 



127 



