PROPERTY AND COMMON SENSE. 149 



paradox should alone be offered us for acceptance ; 

 nor is it easy to believe that his reluctance to express 

 his conclusion totidem verbis was not due to a sense 

 that it might ere long prove more convenient not to 

 have done so. When I advocated the theory of the 

 livingness, or quasi-livingness, of machines, in the 

 chapters of " Erewhon " of which all else that I have 

 written on biological subjects is a development, I took 

 care that people should see the position in its extreme 

 form ; the non-livingness of bodily organs is to the 

 full as startling a paradox as the livingness of non- 

 bodily ones, and we have a right to expect the fullest 

 explicitness from those who advance it. Of course it 

 must be borne in mind that a machine can only claim 

 any appreciable even aroma of livingness so long as 

 it is in actual use. In " Erewhon " I did not think it 

 necessary to insist on this, and did not, indeed, yet 

 fully know what I was driving at. 



The same disposition to avoid committing them- 

 selves to the assertion that any part of the body is 

 non-living may be observed in the writings of the 

 other authorities upon protoplasm above referred to ; 

 I have searched all they said, and cannot find a single 

 passage in which they declare even the osseous parts 

 of a bone to be non-living, though this conclusion 

 was- the raison d'etre of all they were saying and fol- 

 lowed as an obvious inference. The reader will pro- 

 bably agree with me in thinking that such reticence can 

 only have been due to a feeling that the ground was 

 one on which it behoved them to walk circumspectly ; 

 they probably felt, after a vague, ill-defined fashion, 



