tive parts of the body." Thought, emotion, volition are known to the subject of them otherwise than by contractility; for, clearly, of the three categories, contractility alone can be concerned here. Be it so. But why isolate the "subject of them" in this respect from " every other"? Is it my contractilities or contractions that I communicate to my friend when, by "speech and gesture," I essay to convey to him my thoughts, emotions, and volitions. If contractility does not make me conscious of them, how shall contractility make him cognisant of them? Also: is it not plain as daylight that his contractility, in connection with apprehending my thoughts and feelings, is very differently exercised from mine in uttering them? and should he not, for that reason, take in totally different thoughts and feelings from those which I attempt to convey? If my thoughts are molecular contractions, must not precisely the same contractions happen to my friend if he is to understand my meaning? And how can he possibly gratify me by saying, "I entirely agree with you," if the contractions don't agree? What wretched trifling! And this is not all. What has a blind man to do with the "transitory changes in the relative parts of my body," when I call to him out of a crowd, and be, perhaps, has not the slightest idea of who has called? He is no anatomist, we shall say; no physiologist; no natural philosopher. He never heard of the undulations of the atmosphere, nor of the drum of the ear. He takes in the manifestation of my "intellect, feelings, or will" for all that. The idea that they are known to him, any more than they are known to me, only as transitory molecular changes, is a pure hallucination. This is the very chaos and phantasmagorion of science. Mr Huxley's contractility must be in a bad condition, else he would surely have contracted with advantage here. Does he not see, that by isolating the "subject" of thought from the recipient of thought, and by placing them in such outrageously different relations to molecular movement and muscular contraction, he is cutting off the possibility of the recognition of thought by thought. Thought can be recognised by thought only as thought. Mr Huxley admits that the subject of it is conscious of it as thought, not as contraction. It would be unspeakably less absurd to refuse this admission than to demand that the recipient of thought is cognisant of it as contraction merely, and not as thought! 'Tis the very farce and screaming pantomime of logic.

We regret that our space does allow us to follow Dr Stirling farther through the exhaustive and overwhelming argumentation of his intensely interesting brochure. In the form of a tractate, it has more than the value of many a volume. Anything more perfect in the way of analysis-in the way of

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putting the case, as we say-in the way of doing justice to all the considerations involved-and of repeatedly arraying his antagonist against himself-it has not been our fortune to meet with. We should have been glad to produce his exposure of the mighty difference between the place held on one side of the analogy between the electric spark and already existing protoplasm, called in to account for the protoplasm we see coming into existence. Right well may he ask, "If for protoplasm, pre-existing protoplasm is always necessary, how was there ever a first protoplasm?" And if vegetable protoplasm alone can act on the chemical constituents to transform them into itself, while animal protoplasm can act only on matter already elaborated into protoplasm, animal or vege. table, well may he ask how Mr Huxley can venture to lay down the position, that unity of function belongs to all protoplasm whatsoever. We should have been glad, also, to produce our author's demonstration of the inconvertibility of one kind of protoplasm into another. "But a more important point is this, that the functions themselves remain quite apart from the alleged convertibility. We can neither acquire the functions. of what we eat, nor impart our functions to what eats us. We shall not come to fly by feeding on vultures, nor they to speak by feeding on us. No possible manure of human brains will enable a corn-field to reason. But if functions are inconvertible, the convertibility of protoplasm is idle. In this inconvertibility, indeed, functions will be seen to be independent of mere chemical composition. And that is truth: for function there is more required than chemistry and physics.' should, also, have liked to analyse his very complete exposure of the fallacy of Darwinianism with which he sums up his polemic against Mr Huxley. We give instead an extract from his Essay on "Materialism" delivered some twelve months ago to the "Medical Students' Christian Association" in Edinburgh. It is, by itself alone, sufficient to emancipate any reader who has been fascinated by Darwin's wealth of illustration; for it goes to the very heart of his baseless theory :

We

"Accepting natural contingency, however, the Darwinian will be unwilling to believe that his own natural selection is but its metaphor. This, however, it is not difficult to make credible to ourselves. In seasons of scarcity, for example, it is said that the long-necked herbivora, who had necessarily access to trees, might live, while the shortnecked ones died. But where is the natural selection here? Is the long neck, then, as such, better than the short one? Is the contingency of scarcity to be called selection? Selection implies choice, the choice of a better; but, in the contingency that would give leaves to the long neck and deny them to the short, are we to recognise an actual selection, an actual choice? By some convulsion of the earth,

all the water on it might become a foot deep. In that case the sprat conceivably would live, while the whale died; but could such a contingency be regarded as a selection ? In the same way, a change of temperature in any latitude might destroy thousands of lives, but surely it is only a perverse eye that would see in such a catastrophe a process of natural choice. Some other change of conditions might bring it about that our atmosphere should be always in that state of hurricane which alarmed us in Edinburgh some few weeks ago, and in that case it is self-evident that it would be all over with the larks. But would we be right to see in this contingency natural selection— an actual natural choice? Mr Darwin has simply shewn, but with an amazing wealth of illustration, and an amazing love of hypothesis, what we have known all along, that life is dependent on conditions, to which conditions it is also and often in a wonderful manner, but still within limits-pliable; but he has not traced life to conditions, he has not shewn any origin of life from conditions, with consequent ultimate development into the organised world as it now exists."

Christianity and the church of Christ have surely great reason to rejoice in the services of an author so thrice-illustrious in the highest region of thought as Dr Stirling has proved himself to be. We cannot doubt that his tractates on Materialism and Protoplasm will introduce him to the thorough admiration of religious men of science and scientific men of piety to whom his great work on the "Secret of Hegel" may remain a sealed book. For our own part, being unable to afford six months of total leisure for the mastery of it, -and it needs that, we have done little more than spend a few evenings over it. We rejoiced, however, to come upon a passage such as this:

:

"Cannot we, at all events, rise from Hegel with a clearer, firmer conviction of the existence of an infinite principle in this universe,with a clearer, firmer conviction of this principle being thought, spirit, -and with a clearer, firmer conviction that man partakes of this infinite principle, and that, consequently, he is immortal, free, and in communion with God. For, I confess it all comes to this, and that philosophy is useless if inadequate to this. A philosophy, in fact, whose purpose and effect are not to countenance and support all the great interests of religion, is no philosophy, but a material for the fire only."-Secret of Hegel, vol. i. p. 241.

We can fancy the magnanimous delight with which Chalmers would have read a passage such as this, and how cordially he would have wished God-speed to investigations, however intricate and novel, and aside from his own lines of thought, when they lead to issues such as these. Nor can we name the name of the greatest Briton of the century, without saying how strongly we are convinced that the great interests he defended, in the higher philosophy and in natural theology, are all bound, to this day, to the selfsame stake and issues as his splendid

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reasonings and copious illustration bound them. Who are they that would pretend, in Apologetics, to be ahead of him? or why are his immortal works less read by students now than twenty years ago? Is it true that Darwinianism and Protoplasm. have so thoroughly changed the status questionis, that the old lines of defence are antiquated? Far from it. It is refreshing to find Dr Stirling insisting,-as Dr Candlish, in another reference, has analogously insisted,-that, "so far as this argument is concerned, protoplasm has not introduced any the slightest difference. All the ancient reasons for the independence of thought, as against organisation, can be used with even more striking effect as against protoplasm." Nor is it conceivable that anything that physiology can reveal, though microscopic power should increase a million fold, can ever really alter the issue on which the rights of Reason and the being and the claims of God depend. There is an eternal antinomy between the world of molecules and the world of mind. is not to be explained as a transition, but as a contrecoup," as Stirling says so beautifully. The antinomy is reconciled, in the present constitution of man, by correlation, which it is as hopeless to find out by searching, as it is insane to deny. The only conceivable Master of that correlation is the God whom we go a great way to define, when we say that He is its Master, and that He instituted it when, forming Man out of the dust of the earth, He breathed into him the breath of life, and Man became a Living Soul.

"It

How jejune to substitute for this wondrous contrecoup,—this antinomy, harmonised in subtle, searchless correlation,—a tame homogeneity and one-world movement of the dusty molecules themselves! O hexagrammic geometricians, and amphibious archetypal architects,-ye busy bees and building beavers! Hide ye your diminished heads: Othello's occupation's gone. Look at those far more wondrous "cells," that frame themselves, and do their own geometry. Look at these "cottages of clay," that build themselves, not by plan, design, or contract, but by "contractility" alone. See yon wise and witty molecules, thinking, thinking, thinking,-ever thinking out their poems, proofs, plays, and proverbs. See those dutiful and conscientious "eggs," so intelligently obedient evermore to the heavenly command, "Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth." No need of Reason now, nor Instinct; not even that of a beaver or a bee. And no discrimination of, no need of, function. Behold, what a "tricksy eye" the camera obscura is! What powers of vision Lord Rosse's telescope is gifted with! How intelligent and communicative a creature, -though somewhat unscrupulous and unprincipled,—that

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H

galvanic battery, with its trembling needle-fingers and its long antennæ of electric wire! And, high o'er all, imperial, kingly Protoplasm,-father of gods and men!-which taketh oxygen and hydrogen and nitrogen and carbon, and "with part thereof he maketh" more protoplasm, more gods and men, even while all the time rasping in ceaseless contiguity with other "part thereof" which goeth out into the draught!

A burial be decreed for the dirt-philosophy! And a truce with chaff and trifling. We set aside dead lenses, cameras, telescopes,-if eyes have they, yet they see not; magnetic needles,— dead fingers, which Life and Reason alone can point and fugle with; wires, that are not thinkers; tubes and strings, that are not musicians. The workmanship of men's hands, they that make them are not like unto them, till they bow down to worship them, and unman themselves. We set them all aside. We take the littlest living "cell :" and we say of it, what we say of the city which hath foundations, and which cometh down from heaven prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. We say of that little cell, as we say of that great city :—“ Its Builder and Maker is GOD."

μ.

SOLDIERS versus

ART. VI.-A Chapter on France.

FARMERS-PARIS AND THE IMPERIAL PROSPECTSPOITIERS AND CALVIN-BORDEAUX AND 66 FRATERNITY"-BAYONNE AND THE BARTHOLOMEW MASSACRE-BIARRITZ-THE ECUMENICAL COUNCIL AND THE FUTURE OF EUROPE.

FORTNIGHT of tempests, rough seas, and oft-recurring

wrecks along the southern coast of England had filled the columns of the daily papers with disasters. But now the melancholy list was closed, and we had a choice night for crossing the Channel. There was just enough of tumble in the sea to give interest to the voyage. There was a glorious moon in the sky. The cliffs of Dover rose behind us, looking in the pale light like hills of snow, while their beacon-lights, which gleamed on their summit, seemed stars emerging from the horizon, and promising ever to mount into the sky. They did not, however, but clung steadily to their hill-top, and thus indubitably attested, as do certain other stars, their affinity to earth. Away we went over the waters, which heaved like the breast which feels the disturbing force of some great sorrow which has not yet spent itself. The scene was an exhilarating one, though at midnight. The fine moon and sailing-cloud