Property and Common Sense 133 
has followed the course either of biology or psychology 
during this century, and more especially during the last 
five-and-twenty years, will tolerate the reintroduction of 
the soul as something apart from the substratum in which 
both feeling and action must be held to inhere. The notion 
of matter being ever changed except by other matter in 
another state is so shocking to the intellectual conscience 
that it may be dismissed without discussion ; yet if bathy- 
bius had not been promptly dealt with, it must have 
become apparent even to the British public that there 
were indeed but few steps from protoplasm, as the only 
living substance, to vital principle. Our biologists therefore 
stifled bathybius, perhaps with justice, certainly with 
prudence, and left protoplasm to its fate. 
Any one who reads Professor Allman’s address above 
referred to with due care will see that he was uneasy about 
protoplasm, even at the time of its greatest popularity. 
Professor Allman never says outright that the non- 
protoplasmic parts of the body are no more alive than 
chairs and tables are. He said what involved this as an 
inevitable consequence, and there can be no doubt that 
this is what he wanted to convey, but he never insisted on 
it with the outspokenness and emphasis with which so 
startling a paradox should alone be offered us for accept- 
ance ; nor is it easy to believe that his reluctance to express 
his conclusion fotidem 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 
