1863-9 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE ^--i 



and fundamental truths of nature and of the laws of her opera- 

 tions; one who, no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire, but 

 whose passions are trained to come to heel by a vigorous will, 

 the servant of a tender conscience ; who has learned to love all 

 beauty, whether of nature or of art, to hate all vileness, and to 

 respect others as himself. 



Such an one and no other, I conceive, has had a liberal edu- 

 cation, for he is, as completely as a man can be, in harmony with 

 nature. He will make the best of her, and she of him. They 

 will get on together rarely; she as his ever-beneficent mother; 

 he as her mouth-piece, her conscious self, her minister and 

 interpreter. 



The third of these discourses is the address " On the 

 Physical Basis of Life," of which he writes to Haeckel on 

 January 20, 1869 : — 



You will be amused to hear that I went to the holy city, 

 Edinburgh itself, the other day, for the purpose of giving the first 

 of a series of Sunday lectures. I came back without being 

 stoned; but Murchison (who is a Scotchman you know), told me 

 he thought it was the boldest act of my life. The lecture will 

 be published in February, and I shall send it to you, as it con- 

 tains a criticism of materialism which I should like you to 

 consider. 



In it he explains in popular form a striking generalisa- 

 tion of scientific research, namely, that whether in animals 

 or plants, the structural unit of the living body is made up 

 of similar material, and that vital action and even thought 

 are ultimately based upon molecular changes in this life- 

 stuflf. Materialism ! gross and brutal materialism ! was the 

 mildest comment he expected in some quarters ; and he 

 took the opportunitv to explain how he held " this union of 

 materialistic terminology with the repudiation of material- 

 istic philosophy," considering the latter " to involve grave 

 philosophic error." 



His expectations were fully justified ; in fact, he writes 

 that some persons seemed to imagine that he had invented 

 protoplasm for the purposes of the lecture. 



Here, too, in the course of a reply to Archbishop 

 Thompson's confusion of the spirit of modern thought with 



