1884.] 
Hylozoism and Hylo -Idealism. 
273 
foundation must be built whatever philosophy the future has 
in store. 
With that which lies beyond thought and perception we 
can have nothing to do ; nor can we have very much to do 
with thoughts and perceptions which shine dimly through 
long spaces of years. As well might we feign that the light 
of some distant star, reaching us after a journey of two 
millennia, is the guide and strength of our life. If it be 
true that the worth of human conduct consists neither in 
its somatic or spiritual source nor in in its finite or infinite 
duration, but in its own intrinsic quality ; that man has 
made God in his own image, and worships only Self ; that 
all knowledge of others is a form of self-knowledge ; and 
that all sympathy is based not on mere kinship, but on real 
solidarity — if this be true, it is clear that we have the out- 
lines of a system which is no mere speculative philosophy, 
but must affeCt every relation of practical life. And the 
validity of this system admits of support or illustration from 
every department of Physical Science. 
Let us glance along any one of the lines which radiate 
from the democratic substratum of questionable shapes, 
neither wholly animal nor wholly vegetable, and bear, as 
their crowning produCt, some highly specialised aristocrat. 
As the line passes upward new qualities appear, — sometimes 
so suddenly that there is a temptation to invoke supernatural 
agency, and to account for the Inexplicable by ascribing its 
origin to the Unthinkable. Yet, looking closer, we see that 
there is no attribute of man or of imagined angel which has 
not its quaint parody in a lower rank of being. Human 
volition and the “ little living will ” of the Nautilus differ in 
degree, in power, in variety of manifestation ; but the 
difference is specific, not generic. The decorated assembly- 
halls of the Australian bower-birds are not more distinctly 
related to the artistic achievements of man than is the 
whirling dance of the Rotifer to the manifold activities by 
which man earns a living. 
But there is a class of phenomena even more worthy of 
note than these traces of family likeness, even more in- 
structive than direCt evidences of a common line of ancestry; 
because a certain section of the class has been selected by 
Dualists as the basis of their strongest argument. “ How 
is it,” they triumphantly enquire, “ that personal identity 
persists through the constant flux of molecules ; that the 
man who daily dies by inches, and is in like manner regene- 
rated, feels himself to be the same man from month to 
month, and from year to year ? How is it that he remembers 
