of a poisoned dagger, may be, for the time, as completely
individualised and separate from all other life or mind, as every human
being perceives his own conscious mind or self to be. At all events, we
have now reached a point beyond which it would be rash to rush hastily
on. For a while we may be well content to rest where we are. That matter
is nothing else but a peculiar manifestation, or avatar, of some species
of mind, whatever that species be, is a proposition as demonstrably true
as its converse is demonstrably false. Unless it be possible for death
to give birth to life, it is impossible for living mind to be the
offspring of inanimate matter; but so surely as mind is mind, and that
living force alone can act either on mind or aught else, so surely must
all matter that imparts sensation to mind, be itself a species of living
force and consequently a species of mind.

An unexpected conclusion this, and widely different, I confess, from
that to which I was myself looking forward at the outset of the
discussion; yet, at the same time, one of which there is the best
possible proof in the impossibility of conceiving its contrary. It is
besides a conclusion to which not only ought Descartes in consistency to
have come, but at which both Locke and Berkeley, though advancing from
opposite points of the compass, did very nearly arrive; nay, which the
latter did almost touch, and must apparently have grasped, had not his
hands been already full of other things. It is, moreover, one from which
I do not apprehend that Professor Huxley himself will seriously dissent.
Indeed, I almost hope that he may object chiefly to its having been
moved by me as an amendment on his original motion, and that he may be
disposed to claim it for himself as a portion of genuine Huxleyism. If
so, I shall readily recognise the claim so far as to admit that things
very similar to many of those said by me above had already been said by
Professor Huxley; though, in justice to myself, I must add that their
complete opposites had likewise been said by him. But the office which I
here proposed to myself was mainly that of an eclectic, who, going over
a field which another husbandman has tilled, separates the wheat from
the tares, and binds up the former into shapely and easily portable
sheaves; and no more satisfactory assurance can be given of my having
been usefully employed in such subordinate capacity than that Professor
Huxley, who, amongst all h