PREFACE. 7 



is not an answer : it is only business. " My flock will expect a word 

 from me, and will probably not be the worse of one: it will be, 

 so far, a satisfaction to them, and convenient in use, perhaps I" 



Be the nature of the cle verity what it may, then, one must 

 pity the necessity of the shift; and, but for Mr Huxley's 

 authority with the public an authority quite just in its place, 

 doubtless the record, so far as I am concerned, might very 

 w r ell close here. That authority considered, however, perhaps 

 it would be only duly respectful to the public and even to Mr 

 Huxley himself that I should examine his observations in reply 

 to my essay seriatim and at full. This, then, I shall* now do. 



To begin at the end, and travel gradually upwards, I must 

 avow that it is certainly clever to take the three short clauses 

 of the short concluding sentence of my essay as together repre- 

 sentative of the whole, and so, in destroying them, destroy it ! 

 There is management in this especially in view of Dr Beale's 

 quotation of the sentence ; but the question remains has Mr 

 Huxley destroyed, not my essay, but even this its short last 

 sentence ? 



His answer to my proposition that assumes him to hold " that 

 all organisms consist alike of the same life-matter," is only that 

 it turns on the ambiguity of the word " same." Will it be 

 possible to make this good, however? Does Mr Huxley try it? 

 Or is the reference to Whately enough for that ? As for the 

 word " same," I do not believe it to occur more than twice or 

 thrice throughout the whole essay: identity is the term I use 

 for the most part. I have no objection to the word, however, 

 and think it perfectly justifiable: identity itself is certainly 

 sameness. But more I shall accept Mr Huxley's reference to 

 the authority of Archbishop Whately in regard to it, and the 

 ambiguity of its two senses. Of these, the primary one is that 

 of numerical sameness, " applicable," says Whately, " to a single 

 object;" as, I wore to-day the same boots I wore yesterday, 

 meaning, of course, the same individual boots. In reference to 

 the secondary one, again, the Archbishop's words are these: 

 " When several objects are undistinguishably alike, one single 

 description will apply equally to any of them ; and thence they 

 are said to be all of one and the same nature, appearance, etc. : 

 as e.g. when we say, this house is built of the same stone with 

 such another, we only mean that the stones are undistinguish- 

 able in their qualities; not that the one building was pulled 



