osition of its
component molecules,' there can be no 'intelligible ground for refusing
to say that the properties of protoplasm result from the nature and
disposition of its molecules.'

Here, however, our lay preacher candidly warns us that by the vast
majority of his clerical brethren this doctrine would be denounced as
rankest heresy, and that whoever accepts it is placing his foot on the
first rung of a ladder which, in most people's estimation, is the
'reverse of Jacob's, and leads to the antipodes of heaven.' He frankly
owns that the terms of his propositions are distinctly materialistic:
nay, that whoever commits himself to them will be temporarily landed in
'gross materialism.' Not the less, however, does he, mingling
consolation with admonition, recommend us to plunge boldly into the
materialistic slough, promising to point out a way of escape from it,
and insisting, indeed, that through it lies the only path to genuine
spiritualistic truth.

In pronouncing this to be exceedingly evil counsel, as with the most
unfeigned respect for its author I feel bound at once to do, it might
not be necessary for me to undertake a detailed topographical survey of
the path alluded to. It might, perhaps, suffice to specify the
conclusions to which the path is represented as leading, in order to
show that those conclusions cannot possibly be reached by any such
route. By Professor Huxley himself they are thus described:--We know
nothing of matter 'except as a name for the unknown and hypothetical
cause of states of our own consciousness,' nor of spirit, except that
'it also is a name for an unknown and hypothetical cause of states of
consciousness. In other words matter and spirit are but names for the
imaginary _substrata_ of groups of natural phenomena.'

But if matter be not a thing, but a name, and a name too not for a real,
but only an imaginary thing, one perfect certainty is that matter cannot
possibly be composed either wholly or in part of molecules, and, by
necessary consequence, that life cannot possibly be 'the product of any
disposition of material molecules,' nor the phenomena of life be
'expressions of molecular changes in the matter of life.' Of the
particular Huxleian doctrine which we are considering, the two moieties
are absolutely irreconcileable; so that on the assumption that either
moiety were true, the truth of that moiety would be decisive against the
other. If matter have no real, and only a nominal