n the dog Toby. [15]
Before this dog was born or thought of, his form or species was displayed
in each of his parents. And now it looks as though the form of dog had
detached itself from them through the generative act, and set up anew on
its own account. How does it do that? By getting hold of some materials in
which to express itself. At first it takes them from the body of the
mother, afterwards it collects them from a wider environment, and what the
dog eats becomes the dog.

What, then, is the relation of the assimilated materials to the dog-form
which assimilates them? Before assimilation, they have their own form.
Before the dog eats the leg of mutton, it has the form given to it by its
place in the body of a sheep. What happens to the mutton? Is it without
remainder transubstantiated from sheep into dog? It loses all its
distinctively sheep-like characteristicsm but there may be some more
basically material characteristics which it preserves. They underlay the
structure of the mutton, and they continue to underlie the structure of the
dog's flesh which supplants it. Whatever these characteristics may be, let
us call them common material characteristics, and let us say that they
belong to or compose a common material nature.

The common material nature has its own way of existing, and perhaps its own
principles of physical action. We may suppose that we know much or that we
know little about it. This one thing at least we know, that it is capable
of becoming alternatively either mutton or dog's flesh. It is not essential
to it to be mutton, or mutton it would always be; nor dog's flesh, or it
would always be dog's flesh. It is capable of becoming either, according as
it is captured by one or other system of formal organization. So the voters
who are to go to the polls are, by their common nature, Englishmen; they
are essentially neither Socialist curs nor Conservative sheep, but
intrinsically capable of becoming either, if they become captured by either
system of party organization.

According to this way of thinking, there is a certain _looseness_ about the
relation of the common material nature to the higher forms of organization
capable of capturing it. Considered in itself alone, it is perhaps to be
seen as governed by absolutely determined laws of its own. It is heavy,
then it will fall unless obstructed; it is solid, then it will resist
intrusions. But considered as material for organization by higher f