CORPORATE BEHAVIOUR 21 
gas-engine which manufactures its own explosive. During 
the period of repose which intervenes between periods of 
activity, its protoplasm is busy in construction, taking from 
the blood-discs oxygen, and from the blood-fluid carbonaceous 
and nitrogenous materials, and knitting these together into 
relatively unstable explosive compounds, which play the part 
of the mixed air and gas of the gas-engine. A resting muscle 
may be likened to a complex and well-organized battery of 
gas-engines. On the stimulus supplied through a nerve- 
channel a series of co-ordinated explosions takes place: the 
gas-engines are set to work; the muscular fibres contract ; 
the products of the silent explosions are taken up and hurried 
away by the blood-stream; and the protoplasm prepares a 
fresh supply of explosive material. Long before the invention 
of the gas-engine, long before gun-cotton or dynamite were 
dreamt of, long before some Chinese or other inventor first 
mixed the ingredients of gunpowder, organic nature had utilized 
the principle of controlled explosions in the protoplasmic cell, 
and thus rendered animal behaviour possible. 
Certain cells are, however, more delicately explosive than 
others. Those, for example, on or near the external surface 
of the body—those, that is to say, which constitute the end- 
organs of the special senses—contain explosive material which 
may be fired by a touch, a sound, an odour, the contact with 
a sapid fluid or a ray of light. The effects of the explosions 
in these delicate cells, reinforced in certain neighbouring nerve- 
batteries, are transmitted down the nerves as waves of subtle 
chemical or electrolytic change, and thus reach that wonderful 
aggregation of organized and co-ordinated explosive cells, the 
brain. Here it is again reinforced and directed (who, at 
present, can say how ?) along fresh nerve-channels to muscles, 
or glands, or other organized groups of explosives. And in 
the brain, somehow associated with the explosion of its cells, 
consciousness, the mind-element, emerges ; of which we need 
only notice here that it belongs to a wholly different order of 
being from the physical activities and products with which we 
are at present concerned. 
