Proceedings of the Psychological Society of Great Britain, 1875-1879.

  • Psychological Society of Great Britain.
Date:
1880
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Proceedings of the Psychological Society of Great Britain, 1875-1879. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    entirely as a proved reality. We greet with a hearty welcome that Ultima Thule of the Materialists. Tou have traced Man to his elements, and what do you find ? The identical elements to which you trace the beast, the bird, the fish, the tree, the fungus. You can dis- tinguish nothing in the jellies to indicate what they were or what they will be. But here you suddenly stand still. The world that has been admiring your ingenuity in experiment, your skill in marshalling your facts, the facility with which you draw con- clusions from those facts, is looking with eager curiosity for the next step in your exploration. You have presented to science in a saucer your wonderful element of a Man, or to speak more correctly, that wonderful element of all organic life.—The world, anxiously hanging upon your lips, implores you to carry your researches just one small step further, and tell how that uniform protoplasm becomes a man, a mite, a mussel, or a moss-rose. We pause for a reply. What ! is Science silent ? Are Scientists dumb ? Can it be that the hitherto omniscient confess to ignorance ? It is even so. We can go no further, they say, than this protoplasmic jelly. Here our senses and our instru- ments fail us alike. We cannot even indulge in conjecture why this bit of protoplasm becomes a man, or that a mollusc, or that a moss-rose. We admit our ignorance. We do not seek to dissipate it. We know that it is unknowable. We will not, therefore, look an inch beyond this protoplasm. We cannot conceive of anything we do not see, and we will see nothing that is inconceivable. Human percep- tion can penetrate no further. Protoplasm, the visible material of life, is the limit of research. Beyond it is a barrier science cannot pass nor can it ever hope to pass. This is what the Physicists said twelve months ago, and all who questioned their dogma were at once denounced as [286]