We must class as a traditional dogma the wide-spread belief that man is bound under all circumstances to maintain and prolong life, even when it has become utterly useless—a source of pain to the incurable and of endless trouble to his friends. Hundreds of thousands of incurables—lunatics, lepers, people with cancer, etc.—are artificially kept alive in our modern communities, and their sufferings are carefully prolonged, without the slightest profit to themselves or the general body. We have a strong proof of this in the statistics of lunacy and the growth of asylums and nerve-sanatoria. In Prussia alone there were 51,048 lunatics cared for in the asylums (six thousand in Berlin) in 1890; more than one-tenth of them were quite incurable (four thousand of them suffering from paralysis). In France, in 1871, there were 49,589 in the asylums (or 13.8 per thousand of the population), and in 1888 there were 70,443 (or 18.2 per thousand); thus, in the course of seventeen years, the absolute number of the unsound rose nearly 30 per cent. (29.6), while the total population only increased 5.6 per cent. In our day the number of lunatics in civilized countries is, on the average, five-sixths per thousand. If the total population of Europe is put at three hundred and ninety to four hundred millions, we have at least two million lunatics among them, and of these more than two hundred thousand are incurable. What an enormous mass of suffering these figures indicate for the invalids themselves, and what a vast amount of trouble and sorrow for their families, what a huge private and public expenditure! How much of this pain and expense could be spared if people could make up their minds to free the incurable from their indescribable torments by a dose of morphia! Naturally this act of kindness should not be left to the discretion of an individual physician, but be determined by a commission of competent and conscientious medical men. So, in the case of other incurables and great sufferers (from cancer, for instance), the "redemption from evil" should only be accomplished by a dose of some painless and rapid poison when they have expressed a deliberate wish (to be afterwards juridically proved) for this, and under the control of an authoritative commission.
The ancient Spartans owed a good deal of their famous bravery, their bodily strength and beauty, as well as their mental energy and capacity, to the old custom of doing away with new-born children who were born weakly or crippled. We find the same custom to-day among many savage races. When I pointed out the advantages of this Spartan selection for the improvement of the race in 1868 (chapter vii. of the History of Creation) there was a storm of pious indignation in the religious journals, as always happens when pure reason ventures to oppose the current prejudices and traditional beliefs. But I ask: What good does it do to humanity to maintain artificially and rear the thousands of cripples, deaf-mutes, idiots, etc., who are born every year with an hereditary burden of incurable disease? Is it not better and more rational to cut off from the first this unavoidable misery which their poor lives will bring to themselves and their families? It is no use to reply that religion forbids it. Christianity also bids us give up our life for our brethren, and to cast it from us when it hurts us—that is to say, when it only causes useless pain to us and our friends. The truth is, the opposition is only due to sentiment and the power of conventional morality—that is to say, to the hereditary bias which is clothed in early youth with the mantle of religion, however irrational and superstitious be its foundation. Pious morality of this sort is often really the deepest immorality. "Laws and rights creep on like an eternal sickness;" this is equally true of the social customs and morals on which laws and rights are founded. Sentiment should never be allowed to usurp the place of reason in these weighty ethical questions. As I pointed out in the first chapter of the Riddle, sentiment is a very amiable, but a very dangerous, function of the brain. It has no more to do with the attainment of the truth than what is called revelation. That is well seen in Kant's dualism, for his mundus intelligibilis is essentially an outcome of his religious sentimentality
VI
PLASM
Plasm is the universal living substance—Definition of protoplasm, chemically and morphologically—Physical character—Viscous condition—Chemical analysis—Colloid character of albumin—Albuminoid molecules—Elementary structure of plasm—Work of plasm—Protoplasm and metaplasm—Structures of metaplasm—Frothy structure—Skeletal structure—Fibrous structure—Granular structure—Molecular structure—Plasma molecules—Plastidules and biogens—Micella and biophora—Caryoplasm and cytoplasm—Nuclear matter—Chromatin and achromin—Nucleolus and centrosoma—Caryotheka and caryolymph—Cellular matter—Plasma products—Internal plasma products—External plasma products—Cell membranes—Intercellular matter—Cuticular matter.
By plasm, in the widest sense of the word, we mean the living matter, or all bodies that are found to constitute the material foundations of the phenomena of life. It is usual to give this matter the name of protoplasm; but this older and historically important designation has suffered so many changes of meaning through the variety of its applications that it is better now to use it only in the narrower sense. Moreover, recent research on protoplasm has been greatly developed, and several new names have been invented, which are formed from the word "plasm" with a qualifying prefix. These are special varieties of the general idea of plasm, or special modifications of the general matter, such as metaplasm, archiplasm, and so on.
The botanist, Hugo Mohl, who first introduced the name "protoplasm" in 1846, used it to designate a part of the contents of the ordinary plant-cell—namely, the viscous matter that Schleiden called "cell-mucus," which is found on the inner surface of the cell-wall, and often forms a varying net-work or skeleton in the watery fluid in the cell, and exhibits characteristic movements. Mohl gave the name of "primordial skin" to this important wall-layer (the chief element of the plant-cell), and called the material of it, as being chemically different from the other parts of the cell, protoplasm—that is to say, the first (proton) or earliest formation of the organism. It is important to notice that Mohl, the author of the name, conceived it in a purely chemical, not a morphological, sense, like Oscar Hertwig and other recent cytologists. I intend to retain this early chemical idea of protoplasm—or, briefly, plasm. It was also taken in this sense by Max Schultze, who pointed out (in 1860) its extreme significance and wide distribution in all living cells, and introduced an important reform of the cell-theory which we will see later.
The mixing of the chemical and the morphological ideas of protoplasm has been very mischievous in recent biology, and has led to great confusion. It generally comes from a failure to formulate clearly the difference between the two essential elements of the modern notion of the cell—the anatomic distinction between the nucleus and the body of the cell. The internal nucleus (or caryon) had the appearance of a solid, definite, morphologically distinct constituent of the cell; the outer and softer mass which we now call the cell-body (celleus or cytosoma) seemed to be a formless and only chemically definable protoplasm. It was only discovered at a later date that the chemical composition of the nucleus is closely akin to that of the cell-body, and that we may properly associate the caryoplasm of the one with the cytoplasm of the other under the general heading of plasm. All the other materials that we find in the living organism are products or derivatives of the active plasm.