132 Luck, or Cunning ? 
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 earth itself shall pass 
away. This came practically to saying that protoplasm 
was God Almighty, who, of all the forms open to Him, had 
chosen this singularly unattractive one as the channel 
through which to make Himself manifest in the flesh by 
taking our nature upon Him, and animating us with His 
own Spirit. Our biologists, in fact, were fast nearing the 
conception of a God who was both personal and material, 
but who could not be made to square with pantheistic 
notions inasmuch as no provision was made for the inorganic 
world; and, indeed, they seem to have become alarmed 
at the grotesqueness of the position in which they must ere 
long have found themselves, for in the autumn of 1879 
the boom collapsed, and thenceforth the leading reviews 
and magazines have known protoplasm no more. About 
the same time bathybius, which at one time bade fair to 
supplant it upon the throne of popularity, died suddenly, as 
I am told, at Norwich, under circumstances which didnot 
transpire, nor has its name, so far as I am aware, been ever 
again mentioned. 
So much for the conclusions in regard to the larger aspect 
of life taken as a whole which must follow from confining 
life to protoplasm; but there is another aspect—that, 
namely, which regards the individual. The inevitable 
consequences of confining life to the protoplasmic parts of 
the body were just as unexpected and unwelcome here as 
they had been with regard to life at large ; for, as I have 
already pointed out, there is no drawing the line at proto- 
plasm and resting at this point ; nor yet at the next halting- 
point beyond ; nor at the one beyond that. How often is 
this process to be repeated ? and in what can-it end but 
in the rehabilitation of the soul as an ethereal, spiritual, 
vital principle, apart from matter, which, nevertheless, it 
animates, vivifying the clay of our bodies? No one who 
