46 AS REGARDS PROTOPLASM, ETC. 



number of powers for protoplasm ? The manifestations of the 

 higher faculties are not known to the subject of them by con- 

 traction, etc. By what, then, are they known 1 According to 

 Mr Huxley, they can only be known by the powers of proto- 

 plasm; and therefore, by his own showing, protoplasm must 

 possess powers other than those of his own assertion. Pre- 

 cisely, then, his one great power of contractility, Mr Huxley 

 himself confesses to be inapplicable here. Indeed, in his 

 Physiology (p. 193), he makes such an avowal as this: "We 

 class sensations, along with emotions, and volitions, and thoughts 

 under the common head of states of consciousness; but what 

 consciousness ie we know not, and how it is that anything so 

 remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as the result 

 of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the 

 the appearance of the Djin when Alladin rubbed his lamp in 

 the story." Consciousness plainly was not muscular contraction 

 to Mr Huxley when he wrote his Physiology ; it is only since 

 then that he has gone over to the assertion of no power in 

 protoplasm but the triple power, contractility, etc. But the 

 truth is only as his Physiology has it the cleft is simply, as Mr 

 Huxley acknowledges it there, absolute. On one side there is 

 the world of externality, where all is body by body, and away 

 from one another the boundless reciprocal exclusion of the 

 infinite object. On the other side, there is the world of 

 internality, where all is soul to soul, and away into one 

 another the boundless reciprocal inclusion of the infinite 

 subject. This even while it is true that, for subject to 

 be subject, and object object, the boundless intussuscepted 

 multiplicity of the single invisible point of the one, is bat the 

 dimensionless casket into which the illimitable Genius of the 

 other must retract and withdraw itself is the difference of 

 differences ; and certainly it is not internality that can be 

 abolished before externality. The proof for the absoluteness of 

 thought, the subject, the mind, is, on its side, pretty well per- 

 fect. It is not necessary here, however, to enter into that proof 

 at length. Before passing on, I may simply point to the fact 

 that, if thought is to be called a function of matter, it must be 

 acknowledged to be a function wholly peculiar and unlike any 

 other. In all other functions, we are present to processes which 

 are in the same sense physical as the organs themselves. So 

 it is with lung, stomach, liver, kidney, where every step can be 

 followed, so to speak, with eye and hand ; but all is changed 

 when we have to do with mind as the function of brain. 

 Then, indeed, as Mr Huxley thought in his Physiology, we are 

 admitted, as if by touch of Aladdin's lamp, to a world absolutely 

 different and essentially new to a world, on its side of the 

 iacommunicable cleft, as complete, entire, independent, self- 



