47 
ful enough to enable us to see those movements in certain 
particles of the living blood which are now called “ proto- 
plasm,” and set down as “ the physical basis of life ” — 
when we perceive the wavelets within these living particles, 
what do we observe but movement ? By a great magnifying 
power we can trace the motion into portions of the material 
which is alive, far beyond the point of smallness reached by 
the naked eye; but we see nothing then different from the 
larger wavelets of the great stream which passes through the 
heart itself. We are not one whit nearer the discovery of 
anything else than motion, when we have got to the so-called 
“ protoplasm ” and its movements, than when we look at the 
entire man as he walks before us. 
Force, unless the word is understood as identical with 
motion, has, to my mind, no proper place in material changes 
strictly so called. To say that any portion of material sub- 
stance has great force, is only to say in truth that it moves in 
a certain way, unless we mean to include more than matter in 
the statement. By means of those senses through which we 
perceive changes in material objects, we can perceive movement; 
but we can neither see, nor hear, nor touch, nor taste, nor smell 
force, in the sense of that which produces movement. When 
Professor Huxley turns his microscope on the centre of a nettle 
spine, he sees no force — he sees movement only. He calls the 
pulsating matter the protoplasm of the nettle ; but it is only 
matter in motion and nothing more. The moment any one 
speaks of true force he leaves the strictly material which may 
be seen, and turns, not his eyes, but his reason to another 
province of being. 
A law has no existence other than as an idea or state of 
the mind. There is no such substance as a law ; nor is there 
any such quality of any substance. The word expresses no 
reality in nature except a state of thought, whether we look to 
laws written or unwritten. Written laws are ideas expressed 
or signified; unwritten laws are ideas unexpressed or un- 
signified. When any one speaks of changes effected in nature 
by “ laws impressed on matter,”* his words have no thinkable 
meaning. Matter has no ideas, and therefore can have no 
laws so impressed on it as to affect it in any way. What are 
called “ the immutable laws of the material universe 33 are 
nothing in reality but ideas in the minds of those who speak 
of them ; and of all mutable things these ideas are among the 
most mutable. Of all confused and contradictory things, they 
are the most confused and self-destructive. What, for ex- 
Darwin’s Origin of Species, p. 576, 1866. 
