AS REGARDS PROTOPLASM, ETC. 41 



antithesis. The antithesis of antitheses. In it, in fact, we 

 are in presence of the one incommunicable gulf the gulf 

 of all gulfs that gulf which Mr Huxley's protoplasm is as 

 powerless to efface as any other material expedient that has 

 ever been suggested since the eyes of men first looked into it 

 the mighty gulf between death and life. 



The differences alluded to (they are, in order, 1, organisation 

 and life, 2, the objective idea design, and 3, the subjective 

 idea thought), it may be remarked, are admitted by those 

 very Germans to whom protoplasm, name arid thing, is due. 

 They, the most advanced and innovating of them, directly 

 avow that there is present in the cell " an architectonic principle 

 that has not yet been detected." In pronouncing protoplasm 

 capable of active or vital movements, they do by that refer, 

 they admit also, to an immaterial force, and they ascribe the 

 processes exhibited by protoplasm in so many words not 

 to the molecules, but to organisation and life. It is pointed 

 out by Kant generally, that the reason of the specific mode 

 of existence of every part of a living body lies in the whole, 

 whilst with dead masses each part bears this reason within 

 itself ; and this indeed is how the two worlds are differentiated. 

 A drop of water, once formed, is there passive for ever, sus- 

 ceptible to influence, but indifferent to influence, and what 

 influence reaches it is wholly from without. It may be added 

 to, it may be substracted from ; but infinitely apathetic 

 quantitatively, it is qualitatively independent. It is indifferent 

 to its own physical parts. It is without contractility, without ali- 

 mentation, without reproduction, without specific function. Not 

 so the cell, in which the parts are dependent on the whole, and 

 the whole on the parts ; which has its activity and raison d'etre 

 within ; which manifests all the powers which we have described 

 water to want ; and which requires for its continuance conditions 

 of which water is independent. It is only so far as organisation 

 and life are concerned, however, that the cell is thus different from 

 water. Chemically and physically, as said, it can show with it 

 quality for quality. How strangely Mr Huxley's deliverances 

 show beside these facts ! He can " see no break in the series of 

 steps in molecular complication ;" but, glaringly obvious, there is a 

 step added that is not molecular at all, and that has its sup- 

 porting conditions completely elsewhere. The molecules are 

 as fully accounted for in protoplasm as in water ; but the sum 

 of qualities, thus exhausted in the latter, is not so exhausted in 

 the former, in which there are qualities due, plainly, not to the 

 molecules as molecules, but to the form into which they are 

 thrown, and the force that makes that form one. When the 

 chemical elements are brought together, Mr Huxley says, pro- 

 toplasm is formed, " and this protoplasm exhibits the phenomena 



