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agent upon the instrument; which if with reason we may do, then let our hammers rise up and boast they have built our houses, and our pens receive the honour of our writings[1]."
There is small reason to fear that we shall ever know too much of that 'chime of restless motion[2]' which we call life.
We may, indeed, watch the orderly evolution of form, and measure the varied yet regular manifestations of power, and we may weigh, or even imitate some of the less recondite products of the laboratory of life; but we are yet very far from knowing anything of that strange concord of harmonious forces, which endows living matter with such singular properties. An amorphous speck of living gelatinous substance still baffles all the analytic power of both chemist and physiologist[3]: we have no need yet to sigh for new worlds to conquer.
With regard to the charge of materialism, I submit that in science we have nothing to do with such questions; as Professor Huxley has well said in a recent lecture on the Physical Basis of Life[4]: "Fact I know; and Law I know; but what is this necessity, save an empty shadow of my own mind's throwing." And, to quote again from another no less distinguished authority, Isaac Taylor, "If there be room at all for any hesitation or scepticism in relation to the existence of either, it is matter not mind that is in jeopardy[5]."
- ↑ Ibid.
- ↑ When up some woodland dale we catch
The many twinkling smile of ocean,
Or with pleased ear bewildered watch
His chime of restless motion—
Such signs of life old ocean gives
We cannot choose but think he lives.
Keble. - ↑ Darwin, Variation of Animals and Plants, 1868, p. 61.
- ↑ Fortnightly Review, Feb. 1869.
- ↑ The very ground of the assumption that the existence of an external
