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cause assigned for anything until we come to the spiritual — to the Word that 
said, “ Let there he light, and there was light.” 
Dr. Ord — It seems to me that this lecture of Professor Huxley’s is rather 
usurping the place of the paper which we came here to listen to, hut quite 
unavoidably ; for Mr. Wheatley’s paper, having been written some months ago, 
naturally could not take cognizance of Professor Huxley’s important lecture, 
and no one can wonder that Professor Huxley’s lecture should have set men 
thinking. For myself, a young student of physical science, I feel that if I 
accept Professor Huxley’s paper, I am placed in a very unhappy position. 
If I reduce myself to a mass of matter, I can only hope to live and have 
intelligence so long as that matter continues living. It seems the logical 
conclusion of the lecture, that all our aspirations and thoughts — all that we 
usually attribute to the soul — are bound up in matter, and can only exist so 
long as that matter exists in the form of protoplasm. On that subject I think 
both Mr. Wheatley’s paper and Mr. Brooke’s remarks have hit the point 
involved. Professor Huxley, in his paper, has said nothing of the origin of 
life : he has simply brought us to the point, that we are made up of what he 
calls protoplasm. He takes us down to the simplest form, that of the fora- 
minifer — a mere mass of matter of the lowest organic type, and points out 
that it has certain properties associated with a certain quaternary chemical 
constitution, of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, properties usually 
called vital, but which the ^Professor assumes to be merely the reactions 
of protoplasm. But he has not told us that protoplasm is formed without 
the intervention of pre-existing living organism, and that I take to be the 
weak point of his paper. I wonder that he has said nothing of the theory 
of spontaneous generation, which is now being again put forward here and 
on the Continent. Some people think that the advocates of that theory — 
MM. Pennetier and Pouchet — have the advantage ; but the more I read 
of it, the more I am confirmed in the belief that spontaneous generation 
never occurs. Another weak point in the argument is, that we have no in- 
dication whatever of the way in which these different masses of protoplasm — 
in the corpuscles of the blood, for instance — are enabled to act in concert, so 
as to keep the whole body going. How protoplasm is to work in that way, 
I confess I cannot understand. We are told that everything must be rejected 
as unworthy of notice which cannot be subjected to demonstration, or has not 
predicables of number, or shape, &c. We are to believe only in what we can 
comprehend and master. But I think we may, even from aspects of our own 
consciousness, show that there are things which we know to exist, and yet 
which we cannot comprehend. One of the earliest puzzles to me when I began 
to think, and before I knew that the world was round, was — where it ended. 
I used to wonder where I should find the end, and what was beyond. So it 
is now with regard to the infinity of time and space — the same feeling conies 
over me. I know the thing must exist, but I cannot conceive it, and I feel 
an awe before it like that which I feel when I think of my Creator. It is 
the same with regard to our existence. We must add a great deal to what 
Professor Huxley has said before we can have done with this question. 
