'UNIVERSITY; 

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AS REGARDS PROTOPLASM, ETC. 



PART I. 



THE FIRST (PHYSIOLOGICAL) ISSUE ; OR THE " PLUNGE " INTO THE 

 " MATERIALISTIC SLOUGH." 



IT is a pleasure to perceive Mr Huxley open his clear little 

 essay with what we may hold, perhaps, to be the manly 

 and orthodox view of the character and products of the French 

 writer, Auguste Comte. " In applying the name of ' the new 

 philosophy' to that estimate of the limits of philosophical in- 

 quiry which he " (Professor Huxley), " in common with many 

 other men of science, holds to be just," the Archbishop of York 

 confounds, it seems, this new philosophy with the Positive 

 philosophy of M. Comte ; and thereat Mr Huxley expresses him- 

 self as greatly astonished. Some of us, for our parts, may be 

 inclined at first to feel astonished at Mr Huxley's astonishment ; 

 for the school to which, at least on the philosophical side, Mr 

 Huxley seems to belong, is even notorious for its prostration 

 before Auguste Comte, whom, especially so far as method and 

 systematisation are concerned, it regards as the greatest in- 

 tellect since Bacon. For such, as it was the opinion of Mr 

 Buckle, is understood to be the opinion also of Messrs Grote, 

 Bain, and Mill. In fact, we may say that such is commonly and 

 currently considered the characteristic and distinctive opinion 

 of that whole perverted or inverted reaction which has been 

 called the Revulsion. That is to say, to give this word a 

 moment's explanation, that the Voltaires and Humes and Gib- 

 bons having long enjoyed an immunity of sneer at man's blind 

 pride and wretched superstition at his silly non-natural honour 

 and her silly non-natural virtue a reaction had set in, exulting 

 in poetry, in the splendour of nature, the nobleness of man, and 

 the purity of woman, from which reaction again we have, almost 

 within the last decennium, been revulsively, as it were, called 

 back, shall we say by some " bolder " spirits the Buckles, the 



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