194 BE ALE'S OBJECTION TO VITALITY AS A PROPERTY. 



colourless, and perfectly structureless, and therefore 

 one mass is quite indistinguishable in aspect from 

 another of a different kind, is made the groundwork of 

 Dr. Beale's objection to the materialist theory. He 

 says over and over again, how can such a variety of cha- 

 racter and action, the self-moving, the dividing, and the 

 forming structures unlike itself and of infinite variety, 

 depend upon the mere arrangement of the atoms in 

 this apparently simple, uniform substance ? He objects 

 particularly to the term " molecular machinery," which 

 he seems never tired of ridiculing, and seems to think 

 that our mere inability to understand or to express, 

 except by figurative language, the intimate nature of 

 the action in the protoplasm gives, somehow, support 

 to the hypothesis of an immaterial principle added to 

 the protoplasm. I fail to see the cogency of the argu- 

 ment, and rather think he has added to the difficulty 

 by a suggestion which stands in more need of explana- 

 tion than the thing it purports to explain. The truth 

 is, the apparent uniformity of the protoplasm in out- 

 ward appearance, while capable of infinite variety of 

 inward composition, is nothing more than is found in 

 all large classes of chemical compounds. Who expects 

 all transparent and colourless liquids to have the same 

 composition ? and so on, with fifty illustrations. The 

 infinite variety of faculties of the different kinds of 

 living matter was, of course, at once attributed by 

 Fletcher to a corresponding variety of molecular com- 

 position, and no one since, except Dr. Beale, has found 

 any difficulty in doing the same. This variety of 

 composition is included in Fletcher's term " organized," 

 and has been more happily termed " molecular organiza- 



