THE CELL DOCTRINE. 113 



world of thought as we already possess in respect to 

 the material world ; whereas, the alternative, or 

 spiritualistic terminology is utterly barren, and leads 

 to nothing but obscurity and confusion of ideas. 

 Thus, there can be little doubt that the further 

 science advances, the more extensively and consist- 

 ently will all the phenomena of nature be represented 

 by materialistic formulae and symbols. But the man 

 of science, who, forgetting the limits of philosophical 

 inquiry, slides from these formulae and symbols into 

 what is commonly understood by materialism, seems 

 to me to place himself on a level with the mathema- 

 tician, who should mistake the z's and y's, with 

 which he works his problems, for real entities, and 

 with this further disadvantage, as compared with the 

 mathematician : that the blunders of the latter are of 

 no practical consequence, while the errors of sys- 

 tematic materialism may paralyze the energies and 

 destroj' the beauty of a life." 



These are the views of the " physicists," so-called, 

 a school represented by Prof. Huxley, Prof. Owen, 

 Herbert Spencer, Mr. Grove, Prof. Tyndall, and 

 others. Prof. Owen, in the last pages of vol. iii of 

 llie Anatomy of the Vertebrates, declares himself the 

 champion of spontaneous generation, and he main- 

 tains, also, that the formation of living beings out of 

 inanimate matter by the conversion of physical and 

 chemical into vital modes of force, is a matter of 

 daily and hourly occurrence. Mr. Grove says that 

 " in a voltaic battery and its effects we have the 

 nearest approach man has made to an experimental 

 organism," and that in the human body we have 



10* 



