=281.= These utterances may be considered typical of modern materialistic philosophy in its extreme form. We may nevertheless infer from the references to a ‘mysterious force,’ ‘chemical sense-activity akin to smell,’ and ‘erotic chemotropism,’ that the analogies to biological facts which the writer finds in chemical science stand in need of further elucidation. We may notice further that the ‘atom’ has entirely disappeared from the discussion, and that the ‘material basis’ of the facts is a ‘plasma’ or ‘plasmic substance,’ something in fact which stands related to a ‘protoplasm’ of which the chemical and physical sciences know nothing, but which distinctly resembles the ‘fiery creative body’ which is the foundation of the Stoic physics. Further we must notice that the old problem of ‘the one and the many’ reappears in this modern description; for the cell and its nucleus are neither exactly one nor exactly two, but something which passes from two to one and from one to two; further the nuclei of the two cells, being drawn together, coalesce, and from their union is developed a ‘new cell’ which unites the capacities of its ‘parents.’ Modern science, therefore, although it has apparently simplified the history of generation by reducing it to the combination of two units out of many millions that are incessantly being produced by parent organisms, has left the philosophical problem of the manner of their combination entirely unchanged. In these microscopic cells is latent the whole physical and spiritual inheritance of the parents, whether men, animals or plants, from which they are derived; just as the atoms of Epicurus possess the germ of free will[82], so the cells of Haeckel smell and love, struggle for marriage union, melt away in each other’s embrace, and lose their own individuality at the moment that a new being enters the universe. [Sidenote: Creation and procreation.]