His view is that life has arisen from inorganic matter without antecedent life. The experimental facts of biogenesis he discards in favour of a hypothetical and at present undiscovered kind of spontaneous generation. He assumes that the chemico-physical properties of carbon confer so peculiar a power on its albuminoid compounds that they develop into living protoplasm. He says that he formulated this view thirty-three years ago, and that no better monistic theory has arisen to replace it, while to reject some form of spontaneous generation is to admit a miracle:— "The hypothesis of spontaneous generation, and the allied carbon-theory (viz., that 'carbon ... may be considered the chemical basis of life,' p. 2) are of great importance in deciding the long-standing conflict between the _teleological_ (dualistic) and the _mechanical_ (monistic) interpretation of phenomena" (p. 91). But it can hardly be maintained that a "hypothesis" is able to "decide" any dispute. (See, however, Chapter VI.) An unscientific reader could hardly imagine that the apparently detailed account given in the next sentence of the automatic origin of life, as it may have arisen on other planes, and as it must have arisen on this, is of the nature of hypothesis:— "First simple monera are formed by spontaneous generation, and from these arise unicellular protists.... From these unicellular protists arise, in the further course of evolution, first social cell-communities, and subsequently tissue-forming plants and animals" (p. 131). In this hypothesis of automatic origin by the agency of matter and energy alone, he could probably find many biologists to agree with him speculatively; but he goes further than some of them, for he does not limit the automatic or material development to animal and vegetable life alone: he throws automatic consciousness in, too:— "The 'cellular theory' ... has given us the first true interpretation of the physical, chemical, and even the psychological, processes of life" (p. 1). "Consciousness, thought, and speculation are functions of the ganglionic cells of the cortex of the brain" (p. 6). "The peculiar phenomenon of consciousness is not, as du Bois-Reymond and the dualistic school would have us believe, a completely 'transcendental' problem: it is, as I showed thirty-three years ago, a _physiological_ problem, and as such, must be reduced to the phenomena of physics and chemistry" (p. 65). Holding such a view concerning consciousness, in the teeth of the general philosophic opinion of to-day, it is natural to find that of orthodox psychology and psychologists he is contemptuous:—