It may not perhaps be immediately apparent why the admission that a
piece of healthy living brain is more living than the end of a
finger-nail, is so dangerous to common sense ways of looking at life
and death; I had better, therefore, be more explicit. By this
admission degrees of livingness are admitted within the body; this
involves approaches to non-livingness. On this the question arises,
"Which are the most living parts?" The answer to this was given a
few years ago with a flourish of trumpets, and our biologists
shouted with one voice, "Great is protoplasm. There is no life but
protoplasm, and Huxley is its prophet." Read Huxley's "Physical
Basis of Mind." Read Professor Mivart's article, "What are Living
Beings?" in the Contemporary Review, July, 1879. Read Dr. Andrew
Wilson's article in the Gentleman's Magazine, October, 1879.
Remember Professor Allman's address to the British Association,
1879; ask, again, any medical man what is the most approved
scientific attitude as regards the protoplasmic and non-protoplasmic
parts of the body, and he will say that the thinly veiled conclusion
arrived at by all of them is, that the protoplasmic parts are alone
truly living, and that the non-protoplasmic are non-living.

It may suffice if I confine myself to Professor Allman's address to
the British Association in 1879, as a representative utterance.
Professor Allman said:-

"Protoplasm lies at the base of every vital phenomenon. It is, as
Huxley has well expressed it, 'the physical basis of life;' wherever
there is life from its lowest to its highest manifestation there is
protoplasm; wherever there is protoplasm there is life." {122a}