and emphasis 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 position in its extreme form; the non-livingness of bodily organs is to the full as startling a paradox as the livingness of non-bodily ones, and we have a right to expect the fullest explicitness from those who advance it.  Of course it must be borne in mind that a machine can only claim any appreciable even aroma of livingness so long as it is in actual use.  In “Erewhon” I did not think it necessary to insist on this, and did not, indeed, yet fully know what I was driving at.

The same disposition to avoid committing themselves to the assertion that any part of the body is non-living may be observed in the writings of the other authorities upon protoplasm above referred to; I have searched all they said, and cannot find a single passage in which they declare even the osseous parts of a bone to be non-living, though this conclusion was the raison d’etre 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 walk circumspectly; they probably felt, after a vague, ill-defined fashion, that the more they reduced the body to mechanism the more they laid it open to an opponent to raise mechanism to the body, but, however this may be, they dropped protoplasm, as I have said, in some haste with the autumn of 1879.

CHAPTER X—­The Attempt to Eliminate Mind

What, it may be asked, were our biologists really aiming at?—­for men like Professor Huxley do not serve protoplasm for nought.  They wanted a good many things, some of them more righteous than others, but all intelligible.  Among the more lawful of their desires was a craving after a monistic conception of the universe.  We all desire this; who can turn his thoughts to these matters at all and not instinctively lean towards the old conception of one supreme and ultimate essence as the source from which all things proceed and have proceeded, both now and ever?  The most striking and apparently most stable theory of the last quarter of a century had been Sir William Grove’s theory of the conservation of energy; and yet wherein is there any substantial difference between this recent outcome of modern amateur, and hence most sincere, science—­pointing as it does to an imperishable, and as such unchangeable, and as such, again, for ever unknowable underlying substance the modes of which alone change—­wherein, except in mere verbal costume, does this differ from the conclusions arrived at by the psalmist?