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“A872.] 373 [Price. 
says: ‘¢As I have endeavored to prove to you, their protoplasm is essen- 
tially identical with, and most rapidly converted into, that of any animal, 
I can discover no logical halting place between the admission that such 
is the case, and the further concession that all vital action may, with 
equal propriety, be said to be the result of the molecular forces of the 
protoplasm which displays it: And if so, it must be true, in the same 
sense, and to the same extent, that the thoughts to which Tam now giving 
utterance, and your thoughts regarding them, are the expression of molecular 
changes in that matter of life which is the source of our other vital phenom- 
end.”’? Is there anything of uncertain sound in this? He expects from 
it the outery of ‘‘ gross and brutal materialism ;’’ and then confesses that 
“most undoubtedly the terms of the proposition are distinctly materialistic.”? 
What more he next says, I will show hereafter. 
Thus the logical climax of the theory, the capstone of the edifice, ap- 
pears to be that the thoughts and mind of man, being derived from the 
same protoplasmic source as the lower animals and the plant, and the 
physical organization being thence built up, it is consequently to follow, 
that when the life of this body shall be dead, there will be no mind, no 
soul, to survive ; that it can only with truth then be said, ‘‘the bubble of 
life has burst!’ Such would be the natural conclusion of mankind from 
such premises. And if such be the import of human life, what then is the 
worth of creation ! Must the dignity of man, and the glory of the universe, 
and the exalting faith of the immortality of the soul be thus cast down, 
and shorn of their grandeur, and of their logical significance, because the 
works,of the Almighty show some faint resemblances in the early pro- 
cesses of life? That because He makes matter subservient to life, and life 
to the mind or soul, that, therefore, all must be matter, and all but matter? 
If such be the logic of creation, as only now found out by very limited 
applications of the microscope, it would seem to be wise in us to wait a 
thousandfold further applicatious of that instrument to the invisible 
elements of life ; and not the while refuse to use our eyes and the telescope 
as to what they can see, and also to use our understanding and its logic 
as to what they can clearly know, before we surrender our faith in all 
that humanity, in its best conditions through the centuries of time, has 
taken to be the import of our being and the meaning of the universe. 
Happily, however, for our relief, so far as his authority will avail, Dr. 
Huxley makes the admission that, while he is logically carried to a ma- 
terialistic conclusion by his philosophy, he is, in truth, no materialist, and 
that materialization would ‘‘ paralyze the energies and destroy the beauty 
of life.’? He has perceived within himself a.nobler sense of the import of 
his being, that arrests his individual conclusion, and deflects his logic, so 
confidently asserted, into an opposite direction. That is well, and some 
comfort ; but may we take his mere opinion as adequate counterpoise to 
a theory he has advocated with elaborate detail and apparent earnestness 
of conviction? Those who love skepticism will continue to abide by his 
theory, which he has not himself controverted. 
