Luck or Cunning

Sense, and Prot

have no confidence in anything connected with them. As with skin and bones to-day, so with protoplasm to-morrow. Protoplasm is mainly oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon; if we do not keep a sharp look out, we shall have it going the way of the rest of the body, and being declared dead in respect, at any rate, of these inorganic components. Science has not, I believe, settled all the components of protoplasm, but this is neither here nor there;

et the organic character-bodiliness, so to speak-pass out beyond its limits and effect a lodgment in our temporary and extra-corporeal limbs. What, on the protoplasmic theory, the skin and bones are, that the hammer and spade are also; they differ in the de

d constant contact with that which really lives, that an aroma of life attaches to them. Some of these, however, such as horns, hooves, and tusk

or are manufactured directly by the body, as being torn or bitten

entality of tools of the second and first degrees

first. They consist of the simpler compound instruments that yet requ

hird, second, and first. They are compounded of many tools, worked, it m

of the first, as when an engine-man turns a cock, or repairs something with his own hands if he has nothing better to work with. But put a hammer, for example, to a piece of protoplasm, and the protoplasm will no more know what to do with it than we should be able to saw a piece of wood in two without a saw. Even protoplasm from the hand of a carpenter who has been handling hammers all his life would be hopelessly put off its stroke if not allowed to work in its usual way but put bare up against a hammer; it would make a slimy mess and then dry up; still there can be no doubt (so at least those who uphold protoplasm as

t and bring into a condition of mind in which they shall see things as it sees them itself, and, as we commonly say, "agree with" it, instead of standing out stiffly for their own opinion. We call this digesting our food; more properly we should call it being digested by our food, which reads, marks, learns, and inwardly digests us, till it comes to understand us and encourage us by assuring us that we were perfectly right all the time, no matter what any one might have said, or say, to the contrary. Having thus recanted all its own past heresies, it sets to work to convert everything tha

of their being used by something that really lives, then so, though in a less degree, must tools and machines. If, on the other hand, tools and machines are held non-living inasmuch as they only owe what little appearance of life they may present when in actual use to something else that lives, and have no life of their own-so, though in a less degree, must the non-protoplasmic parts of th

ons, and in the case under consideration so completely do we instinctively recognise the underlying identity of tools and limbs, that scientific men use the word "organ" for any part of the body that discharges a function, practically to the exclusion of any other term. Of course, however, the above c

s back into so dim a past that we can only know it by way of inference. In the absence of any show of reason to the contrary we should argue from the known to the unknown, and presume that even as our non-bodily organs originated and were developed through gradual accumulation of design, effort, and contrivance guided by experience, so also must our bodily organs have been, in spite of the fact that the contrivance has been, as it were, denuded of external evidences in the course of long time. This at least is the most obvious inference to draw; the burden of proof sho

r's most crushing argument was allowed by Mr. Darwin to go without reply, still the considerations arising from the discoveries of the last forty years or so in connection with protoplasm, seem to me almost more overwhelming still. This evidence proceeds on different lines from that adduced by Mr. Spencer, but it points to the same conclusion, namely, that though luck will avail much if backed

fect daily conduct; I reply that it is no part of my business to inquire whether this or that makes for my pet theories or against them; my concern is to inquire whether or no it is borne out by facts, and I find the opinion that protoplasm is the one living substance unstable, inasmuch as it is an attempt to make

d to disunite them, and that thus protoplasm must be seen as the life of the world-as a vast body corporate, never dying till the earth itself shall pass away. This came practically to saying that protoplasm was God Almighty, who, of all the forms open to Him, had chosen this singularly unattractive one as the channel through which to make Himself manifest in the flesh by taking our nature upon Him, and animating us with His own Spirit. Our biologists, in fact, were fast nearing the conception of a God who was both personal and material, but who could not be made to square with panthe

d; nor at the one beyond that. How often is this process to be repeated? and in what can it end but in the rehabilitation of the soul as an ethereal, spiritual, vital principle, apart from matter, which, nevertheless, it animates, vivifying the clay of our bodies? No one who 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

with which so startling a paradox should alone be offered us for acceptance; nor is it easy to believe that his reluctance to express his conclusion totidem 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

s parts of a bone to be non-living, though this conclusion was the raison d'être of all they were saying and followed as an obvious inference. The reader will probably agree with me in thinking that such reticence can only have been due to a feeling that the ground was one on which it behoved them to