were saying and followed as an obvious inference. The reader will
probably agree with me in thinking that such reticence can only have
been due to a feeling that the ground was one on which it behoved
them to walk circumspectly; they probably felt, after a vague, ill-
defined fashion, that the more they reduced the body to mechanism
the more they laid it open to an opponent to raise mechanism to the
body, but, however this may be, they dropped protoplasm, as I have
said, in some haste with the autumn of 1879.



CHAPTER X--The Attempt to Eliminate Mind



What, it may be asked, were our biologists really aiming at?--for
men like Professor Huxley do not serve protoplasm for nought. They
wanted a good many things, some of them more righteous than others,
but all intelligible. Among the more lawful of their desires was a
craving after a monistic conception of the universe. We all desire
this; who can turn his thoughts to these matters at all and not
instinctively lean towards the old conception of one supreme and
ultimate essence as the source from which all things proceed and
have proceeded, both now and ever? The most striking and apparently
most stable theory of the last quarter of a century had been Sir
William Grove's theory of the conservation of energy; and yet
wherein is there any substantial difference between this recent
outcome of modern amateur, and hence most sincere, science--pointing
as it does to an imperishable, and as such unchangeable, and as
such, again, for ever unknowable underlying substance the modes of