146 LUCK, OR CUNNING? 



substance, wheii I find this view so useful to me as 

 tending to substantiate design — which I admit that I 

 have as much and as seriously at heart as I can allow 

 myself to have any matter which, after all, can 

 so little affect daily conduct; I reply that it is no 

 part of my business to inquire whether this or that 

 makes for my pet theories or against them; my 

 concern is to inquire whether or no it is borne out 

 by facts, and I find the opinion that protoplasm is 

 the one living substance unstable, inasmuch as it is 

 an attempt to make a halt where no halt can be 

 made. This is enough; but, furthermore, the fact 

 that the protoplasmic parts of the body are more 

 living than the non-protoplasmic — which I cannot 

 deny, without denying that it is any longer con- 

 venient to think of life and death at all — will answer 

 my purpose to the full as well or better. 



I pointed out another consequence, which, again, 

 was cruelly the reverse of what the promoters of the 

 protoplasm movement might be supposed anxious to 

 arrive at — in a series of articles which appeared in 

 the Examiner during the summer of 1879, and 

 showed that if protoplasm were held to be the sole 

 seat of life, then this unity in the substance vivifying 

 all, both animals and plants, must be held as uniting 

 them into a single corporation or body — especially 

 when their community of descent is borne in mind — 

 more effectually than any merely superficial separation 

 into individuals can be held to disunite them, and 

 that thus protoplasm must be seen as the life of the 

 world — as a vast body corporate, never dying till the 



