AS REGARDS PROTPOLASM, ETC. 37 



which I, who have little business to speak, wish success. This 

 universe is not an accidental cavity, in which an accidental 

 dust has been accidentally swept into heaps for the accidental 

 evolution of the majestic spectacle of organic and inorganic 

 life. That majestic spectacle is a spectacle as plainly for the eye 

 of reason as any diagram of mathematic. That majestic 

 spectacle could have been constructed, was constructed, only in 

 reason, for reason, and by reason. From beyond Orion and the 

 Pleiades, across the green hem of earth, up to the imperial per- 

 sonality of man, all, the furthest, the deadest, the dustiest, is 

 for fusion in the invisible point of the single Ego which alone 

 glorifies it. For the subject, and on the model of the subject, all 

 is made. Therefore it is that though precisely as there are 

 acephalous monsters by way of exception and deformity, there 

 may be also at the very extremity of animated existence cells 

 without a nucleus I cannot help believing that this nucleus 

 itself, as analogue of the subject, will yet be proved the most 

 important and indispensable of all the normal cell elements. 

 Even the phenomena of the impregnated egg seem to me to 

 support this view. In the egg, on impregnation, it seems to me 

 natural (I say it with a smile) that the old sun that ruled it 

 should go down, and that a new sun, stronger in the combina- 

 tion of the new and the old, should ascend into its place ! 



Be these things as they may, we have now overwhelming 

 evidence before us for concluding, with reference to Mr 

 Huxley's first proposition, that in view of the nature of micro- 

 scopic science in view of the state of belief that obtains at 

 present as regards nucleus, membrane, and entire cell even in 

 view of the supporters of protoplasm itself Mr Huxley is not 

 authorised to speak of a physical matter of life ; which, for the 

 rest, if granted, would, for innumerable and, as it appears to 

 me, irrefragable reasons, be obliged to acknowledge for itself, 

 not identity, but an infinite diversity in power, in form, and in 

 substance. 



So much for the first proposition in Mr Huxley's essay, or 

 that which concerns protoplasm, as a supposed matter of life, 

 identical itself, and involving the identity of all the various 

 organs and organisms which it is assumed to compose. What 

 now of the second proposition, or that which concerns the 

 materiality at once of protoplasm, and of all that is conceived 

 to derive from protoplasm? In other words, though, so to 

 speak, for organic bricks anything like an organic clay still 

 awaits the proof, I ask, if the bricks are not the same, because 

 the clay is not the same, what if the materiality of the former 

 is equally unsupported Jby the materiality of the latter ? Or 

 what if the functions of protoplasm are not the properties of its 

 mere molecular constitution ? 



