nference when matter was
observed to move. It was the vehicle of an energy not its own--the
repository of forces impressed on it from without--the purely passive
recipient of the shock of the Divine. The logical form continues, but
the subject-matter is changed. 'The evolution of nature,' says
Professor Knight, 'may be a fact; a daily and hourly apocalypse. But
we have no evidence of the non-vital passing into the vital.
Spontaneous generation is, as yet, an imaginative guess, unverified by
scientific tests. And matter is not itself alive. Vitality, whether
seen in a single cell of protoplasm or in the human brain, is a thing
sui generis, distinct from matter, and incapable of being generated
out of matter.' It may be, however, that, in process of time, vitality
will follow the example of motion, and, after the necessary antecedent
wrangling, take its place among the attributes of that 'universal
mother' who has been so often misdefined.

That 'matter is not itself alive' Professor Knight seems to regard as
an axiomatic truth. Let us place in contrast with this the notion
entertained by the philosopher Ueberweg, one of the subtlest heads
that Germany has produced. 'What occurs in the brain' says Ueberweg
'would, in my opinion, not be possible, if the process which here
appears in its greatest concentration did not obtain generally, only
in a vastly diminished degree. Take a pair of mice and a cask of
flour. By copious nourishment the animals increase and multiply, and
in the same proportion sensations and feelings augment. The quantity
of these latter possessed by the first pair, is not simply diffused
among their descendants, for in that case the last must feel more
feebly than the first. The sensations and feelings must necessarily be
referred back to the flour, where they exist, weak and pale it is
true, and not concentrated as they are in the brain.' [Footnote:
Letter to Lange: 'Geschichte des Materialismus,' zweite Aufl,
vol. ii. p. 521.] We may not be able to taste or smell alcohol in a
tub of fermented cherries, but by distillation we obtain from them
concentrated Kirschwasser. Hence Ueberweg's comparison of the brain
to a still, which concentrates the sensation and feeling,
pre-existing, but diluted in the food.

'Definitions,' says Mr. Holyoake, [Footnote: 'Nineteenth Century,'
September 1878.] 'grow as the horizon of experience expands. They
are not inventions, but descriptions of the state of