THE 



UNI7ERS; 



AS REGARDS PROTOPLASM, ETC. 



system, in some such proportion, perhaps, as the 

 In protoplasm, even the lowest, then, but much more con- 

 spicuously in the highest, there is, in addition to the molecular 

 force, another force unsignalised by Mr Huxley the force of 

 vital organisation. 



But this force is a rational unity, and that is an idea ; and 

 this I would point to as a second form of the addition to the 

 chemistry and physics of protoplasm. We have just seen, it is 

 true, that an idea may be found in inorganic matter, as in the 

 solar and sidereal systems generally. But the idea in organised 

 matter is not one operative, so to speak, from without ; it is one 

 operative from within, and in an infinitely more intimate and 

 pervading manner. The units that form the complement of an 

 inorganic system are but independently and externally in place, 

 like units in a procession ; but in what is organised there is no 

 individual that is not sublated into the unity of the single life. 

 This is so even in protoplasm. Mr Huxley, it is true, desider- 

 ates, as result of mere ordinary chemical process, a life-stuff in 

 mass, as it were in the web, to which he has only to resort for 

 cuttings and cuttings in order to produce, by aggregation, what 

 organised individual he pleases. But the facts are not so : we 

 cannot have protoplasm in the web, but the piece. There is as 

 yet no matter of life ; there are still cells of life. It is no shred 

 of protoplasm no spoonful or toothpickful that can be recog- 

 nised as adequate to the function and the name. Such shred 

 may wriggle a moment, but it produces nought, and it dies. 

 In the smallest, lowest protoplasm cell, then, we have this 

 rational unity of a complement of individuals that only are for 

 the whole and exist in the whole. This is an idea, therefore ; 

 this is design: the organised concert of many to a single 

 common purpose. The rudest savage that should, as in Paley's 

 illustration, find a watch, and should observe the various con- 

 trivances all controlled by the single end in view, would be 

 obliged to acknowledge though in his own way that what he 

 had before him was no mere physical, no mere molecular 

 product. So in protoplasm : even from the first, but, quite 

 undeniably, in the completed organisation at last, which alone 

 it was there to produce ; for a single idea has been its one 

 manifestation throughout. And in what machinery does it not 

 at length issue? Was it molecular powers that invented a 

 respiration that perforated the posterior ear to give a balance 

 of air that compensated the fenestra ovalis by a fenestra rotunda 

 that placed in the auricular sacs those otolithes, those express 

 stones for hearing? Such machinery! The chordae tendinece 

 are to the valves of the heart exactly adjusted check-strings ; 

 and the contractile columnce carnece are set in, under contraction 

 and expansion, to equalise the length of these strings to their 



