the universe, the construction of a human body? Who gave them instruction in so correlating its parts that they might be all subject to the will? Who educated them in the art of transmuting nutrient matter into living matter? If the transformation is a mere change in the arrangement of the molecules, effected by physical forces, why may not physical forces effect, in the animal kingdom, the requisite molecular arrangements with inorganic matter, constructing animals directly from mineral substances, and not as is invariably the case from pre-existing bioplasm? After explaining why animal bioplasts are thus restricted in their operations, while vegetable bioplasts, which are declared to be the same, are capable of working inorganic matter into living organisms, the materialist may proceed to explain whence the animal bioplast acquired the skill of weaving a nerve through and around a muscle, a tendon through an opening left in a bone for its reception. What agency directs the working of these infinitesimal units of life? Materialism answers: It is all mechanism, pure mechanism, without any superintending agency which directs the myriad movements of the complicated machine. Reason asserts: No.

It is irrational to assume that several sets of bioplasts, acting independent of each other and without any superintendent, may produce a joint result which evinces design. How do they happen to construct a socket and a ball to constitute a joint? How are they induced to construct an eye fitted to receive light, and a nerve adapted to communicate the sensation of light to the brain? How came they to fashion an ear adapted to the reception of sound? Is it possible that the labors of ten thousand slaves, who worked upon the great Pyramid of Gizeh, were not directed by any superintendent? If there had been as many independent wills as there were

workmen, or rather if there had been no wills whatever, would there have been unity of design in the result? The illustration, however, does injustice to the teleological theory of life, for the bioplasts that work in the human body are numbered by millions, not merely by thousands; nor are they capable of holding consultations and determining upon a plan which shall have its parts so related as to manifest a settled purpose looking to remote results, as Egyptian pyramid-builders might have done; nor is the life of bioplasts extended to nearly half a century, thereby enabling them to realize the completion of their plans, as is true in the case of the human beings whose bodies they build. What, then, is the power which moves, directs, and controls bioplasts? Materialists answer, Physical force. Reason answers, Life. Beale, and Carpenter, and Frey, and a host of other specialists answer, Yes, life.

Dr. Lionel S. Beale says:-" In the first place, no one has been able to explain, by known laws, the facts of development; and secondly, no one is able to premise from the most careful and minute examination of living matter that can be instituted, what form will result from its development, or what kind of organism has given origin to it; and lastly, the occurrence of successive series of structural changes which occur at definite periods of development of a living being as its structures and organs gradually progress towards completeness, and which are as it were foreseen and prepared for at a very early period, long before any structure whatever has been evolved, cannot be accounted for unless some guiding power unknown to physics, and not yet brought within the grasp of law, is assumed to exist."

Again: "I have ventured to speculate concerning vital power simply because I find it impossible to account

for the ordinary universal life-phenomena without the aid of an hypothesis of this kind. I ask by what means the matter of a living being is made to assume certain definite relations in order that a fixed purpose may be carried out at a distant period in time? It is asserted confidently that all is due to physics, that life is inorganic force; and it has even been affirmed that life is associated with every kind of matter, non-living as well as living, that physical force is life, and that life is physical force. But this is pure assertion, for no form or mode of force under any conditions has been known to effect changes in any way analogous with those by which every form of matter that lives is characterized."

Once again: "If I may be allowed to state, what according to my idea would be the inference deduced by an unprejudiced scientific observer who had studied the minute changes in living matter and the gradual development of lifeless form out of the living formless, it would be this: That the true cause of what he observed could not be physical, and that the remarkable phenomena he noticed were not due to ordinary material forces."*

Protoplasm; or Matter and Life, Dr. Lionel S. Beale, 1874, pp. 310, 357, 359.

CHAPTER XVIII.

LIFE AND ITS RELATIONS TO MATTER (CONTINUED).

It may perhaps be said that a complete refutation of the mechanical theory necessitates a consideration of the views of those who do not regard life as an attribute of matter, but as an attribute of an underlying reality which has two sets of properties, the material and the spiritual. Has the existence of any such underlying single reality been proved? If so, what is it? If not, why push the question into the field of pure speculation? Besides, if there is any such undivided reality underlying all things, whether it be material or immaterial—and it must be one or the other-it must be a very singular reality which is capable of possessing two directly opposite sets of qualities, extension and non-extension, activity and inactivity, form and formlessness-the distinctive properties of mind and the distinctive properties of matter also.

This theory, in the hands of Prof. Alexander Bain and Prof. Tyndall, assumes the form of an elaborate attempt to combine two theories of life, the mechanical and the teleological. "The arguments," says Prof. Bain, "for two substances, have, we believe, now entirely lost their validity; they are no longer compatible with ascertained science and clear thinking. The one substance, with two sets of properties, two sides, the physical and the mental-a double-faced unity-would

appear to comply with all the exigencies of the

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case."

The advocates of this view claim for it the honor of doing full justice to both phases of life, the material and the mental. They pronounce it competent to explain all the phenomena of organic existences, regarding them as an intimately connected, and uninterrupted series of purposive effects resulting from the varied combinations of the two sets of qualities which inhere in the one substance. Life, then, is not to be regarded as a necessary, nor even as an ordinary, quality of matter, indeed not as a quality of matter at all, but as the quality of a substratum in which inhere both the matter and the life of an organism. Life is an affection which matter seems to assume when its molecules are arranged according to a certain extended class of forms, that is, in the vegetable and animal kingdom; in reality, the spiritual side of this "double-faced unity" is more fully turned towards the observer-simply this. Matter, whatever its primary qualities may be, takes upon itself new qualities with new arrangements of its molecules. Life, whatever its essential attributes may be, manifests different phenomena according to the combinations of spiritual qualities displayed by this underlying reality in each living organism. Life, so far as science is able to determine, is never separate from matter. Matter, under every form, has some measure of life. sets of properties; here, the uous; there, the mental are. sible in a material germ, are so far independent of external influences, and so far permanent in each organism, as to need no internal directing agent to control them, only a certain environment being necessary to their full *Mind and Body, p. 196.

The one substance has two physical are more conspicMental qualities, transmis