I have said enough to show that in the decade, roughly, between 1870 and 1880 the set of opinion among our leading biologists was strongly against mind, as having in any way influenced the development of animal and vegetable life, and it is not likely to be denied that the prominence which the mindless theory of natural selection had assumed in men’s thoughts since 1860 was one of the chief reasons, if not the chief, for the turn opinion was taking. Our leading biologists had staked so heavily upon natural selection from among fortuitous variations that they would have been more than human if they had not caught at everything that seemed to give it colour and support. It was while this mechanical fit was upon them, and in the closest connection with it, that the protoplasm boom developed. It was doubtless felt that if the public could be got to dislodge life, consciousness, and mind from any considerable part of the body, it would be no hard matter to dislodge it, presently, from the remainder; on this the deceptiveness of mind as a causative agent, and the sufficiency of a purely automatic conception of the universe, as of something that will work if a penny be dropped into the box, would be proved to demonstration. It would be proved from the side of mind by considerations derivable from automatic and unconscious action where mind _ex hypothesi_ was not, but where action went on as well or better without it than with it; it would be proved from the side of body by what they would doubtless call the “most careful and exhaustive” examination of the body itself by the aid of appliances more ample than had ever before been within the reach of man. This was all very well, but for its success one thing was a _sine quâ non_—I mean the dislodgment must be thorough; the key must be got clean of even the smallest trace of blood, for unless this could be done all the argument went to the profit not of the mechanism, with which, for some reason or other, they were so much enamoured, but of the soul and design, the ideas which of all others were most distasteful to them. They shut their eyes to this for a long time, but in the end appear to have seen that if they were in search of an absolute living and absolute non-living, the path along which they were travelling would never lead them to it. They were driving life up into a corner, but they were not eliminating it, and, moreover, at the very moment of their thinking they had hedged it in and could throw their salt upon it, it flew mockingly over their heads and perched upon the place of all others where they were most scandalised to see it—I mean upon machines in use. So they retired sulkily to their tents baffled but not ashamed. * * * * *