These sentences will be acknowledged, I think, fairly to represent Mr. Huxley’s relative deliverances, and, consequently, as I may be allowed to explain again, the only important—while much the larger—part of the whole essay. Mr. Huxley, that is, while devoting fifty paragraphs to our physiological immersion in the “materialistic slough,” grants but one-and-twenty towards our philosophical escape from it; the fifty besides being, so to speak, in reality the wind, and the one-and-twenty only the whistle for it. What these latter say, in effect, is no more than this, that,—matter being known not in itself but only in its qualities, and cause and effect not in their nexus but only in their sequence,—matter may be spirit or spirit matter, cause effect or effect cause—in short, for aught that Mr. Huxley more than phenomenally knows, this may be that or that this, first second, or second first, but the conclusion shall be this, that he will lay out all our knowledge materially, and we may lay out all our ignorance immaterially—if we will. Which reasoning and conclusion, I may merely remark, come precisely to this: That Mr. Huxley—who, hoping yet to see each object (a pin, say) not in its qualities but in _itself_, still, consistently antithetic, cannot believe in the extinction of fire by water or of life by the rope, for any _reason_ or for any _necessity_ that lies in the nature of the case, but simply for the habit of the thing—has not yet put himself at home with the metaphysical categories of _substance_ and _casualty_; thanks, perhaps, to those guides of his whom we, the amusing Britons that we are, bravely proclaim “the foremost thinkers of the day”! The matter and manner of the whole essay are now fairly before us, and I think that, with the approbation of the reader, its procedure, generally, may be described as an attempt to establish, not by any complete and systematic induction, but by a variety of partial and illustrative assertions, two propositions. Of these propositions the first is, That all animal and vegetable organisms are essentially alike in power, in form, and in substance; and the second, That all vital and intellectual functions are the properties of the molecular disposition and changes of the material basis (protoplasm) of which the various animals and vegetables consist. In both propositions, the agent of proof is this same alleged material basis of life, or protoplasm. For the first of them, all animal and vegetable organisms shall be identified in protoplasm; and for the second, a simple chemical analogy shall assign intellect and vitality to the molecular constituents of the protoplasm, in connection with which they are at least exhibited. In order, then, to obtain a footing on the ground offered us, the first question we naturally put is, What is Protoplasm? And an answer to this question can be obtained only by a reference to the historical progress of the physiological cell theory.