Luck, or Cunning, as the Main Means of Organic ModificationButler, Samuel
Philosophy
Luck, or Cunning, as the Main Means of Organic Modification
Butler, Samuel
Evolution; Natural selection
I pointed out another consequence, which, again, was cruelly the reverse
of what the promoters of the protoplasm movement might be supposed
anxious to arrive at—in a series of articles which appeared in the
_Examiner_ during the summer of 1879, and showed that if protoplasm were
held to be the sole seat of life, then this unity in the substance
vivifying all, both animals and plants, must be held as uniting them into
a single corporation or body—especially when their community of descent
is borne in mind—more effectually than any merely superficial separation
into individuals can be held to disunite them, and that thus protoplasm
must be seen as the life of the world—as a vast body corporate, never
dying till the earth itself shall pass away. This came practically to
saying that protoplasm was God Almighty, who, of all the forms open to
Him, had chosen this singularly unattractive one as the channel through
which to make Himself manifest in the flesh by taking our nature upon
Him, and animating us with His own Spirit. Our biologists, in fact, were
fast nearing the conception of a God who was both personal and material,
but who could not be made to square with pantheistic notions inasmuch as
no provision was made for the inorganic world; and, indeed, they seem to
have become alarmed at the grotesqueness of the position in which they
must ere long have found themselves, for in the autumn of 1879 the boom
collapsed, and thenceforth the leading reviews and magazines have known
protoplasm no more. About the same time bathybius, which at one time
bade fair to supplant it upon the throne of popularity, died suddenly, as
I am told, at Norwich, under circumstances which did not transpire, nor
has its name, so far as I am aware, been ever again mentioned.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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