It may be said that the life of clothes in wear and implements in use is no true life, inasmuch as it differs from flesh and blood life in too many and important respects; that we have made up our minds about not letting life outside the body too decisively to allow the question to be reopened; that if this be tolerated we shall have societies for the prevention of cruelty to chairs and tables, or cutting clothes amiss, or wearing them to tatters, or whatever other absurdity may occur to idle and unkind people; the whole discussion, therefore, should be ordered out of court at once.
I admit that this is much the most sensible position to take, but it can only be taken by those who turn the deafest of deaf ears to the teachings of science, and tolerate no going even for a moment below the surface of things. People who take this line must know how to put their foot down firmly in the matter of closing a discussion. Some one may perhaps innocently say that some parts of the body are more living and vital than others, and those who stick to common sense may allow this, but if they do they must close the discussion on the spot; if they listen to another syllable they are lost; if they let the innocent interlocutor say so much as that a piece of well-nourished healthy brain is more living than the end of a finger-nail that wants cutting, or than the calcareous parts of a bone, the solvent will have been applied which will soon make an end of common sense ways of looking at the matter. Once even admit the use of the participle “dying,” which involves degrees of death, and hence an entry of death in part into a living body, and common sense must either close the discussion at once, or ere long surrender at discretion.
Common sense can only carry weight in respect of matters with which every one is familiar, as forming part of the daily and hourly conduct of affairs; if we would keep our comfortable hard and fast lines, our rough and ready unspecialised ways of dealing with difficult questions, our impatience of what St. Paul calls “doubtful disputations,” we must refuse to quit the ground on which the judgments of mankind have been so long and often given that they are not likely to be questioned. Common sense is not yet formulated in manners of science or philosophy, for only few consider them; few decisions, therefore, have been arrived at which all hold final. Science is, like love, “too young to know what conscience,” or common sense, is. As soon as the world began to busy itself with evolution it said good-bye to common sense, and must get on with uncommon sense as best it can. The first lesson that uncommon sense will teach it is that contradiction in terms is the foundation of all sound reasoning—and, as an obvious consequence, compromise, the foundation of all sound practice. This, it follows easily, involves the corollary that as faith, to be of any value, must be based on reason, so reason, to be of any value, must be based on faith, and that neither can stand alone or dispense with the other, any more than culture or vulgarity can stand unalloyed with one another without much danger of mischance.
It may not perhaps be immediately apparent why the admission that a piece of healthy living brain is more living than the end of a finger-nail, is so dangerous to common sense ways of looking at life and death; I had better, therefore, be more explicit. By this admission degrees of livingness are admitted within the body; this involves approaches to non-livingness. On this the question arises, “Which are the most living parts?” The answer to this was given a few years ago with a flourish of trumpets, and our biologists shouted with one voice, “Great is protoplasm. There is no life but protoplasm, and Huxley is its prophet.” Read Huxley’s “Physical Basis of Mind.” Read Professor Mivart’s article, “What are Living Beings?” in the Contemporary Review, July, 1879. Read Dr. Andrew Wilson’s article in the Gentleman’s Magazine, October, 1879. Remember Professor Allman’s address to the British Association, 1879; ask, again, any medical man what is the most approved scientific attitude as regards the protoplasmic and non-protoplasmic parts of the body, and he will say that the thinly veiled conclusion arrived at by all of them is, that the protoplasmic parts are alone truly living, and that the non-protoplasmic are non-living.
It may suffice if I confine myself to Professor Allman’s address to the British Association in 1879, as a representative utterance. Professor Allman said:—
“Protoplasm lies at the base of every vital phenomenon. It is, as Huxley has well expressed it, ‘the physical basis of life;’ wherever there is life from its lowest to its highest manifestation there is protoplasm; wherever there is protoplasm there is life.” [122a]
To say wherever there is life there is protoplasm, is to say that there can be no life without protoplasm, and this is saying that where there is no protoplasm there is no life. But large parts of the body are non-protoplasmic; a bone is, indeed, permeated by protoplasm, but it is not protoplasm; it follows, therefore, that according to Professor Allman bone is not in any proper sense of words a living substance. From this it should follow, and doubtless does follow in Professor Allman’s mind, that large tracts of the human body, if not the greater part by weight (as bones, skin, muscular tissues, &c.), are no more alive than a coat or pair of boots in wear is alive, except in so far as the bones, &c., are more closely and nakedly permeated by protoplasm than the coat or boots, and are thus brought into closer, directer, and more permanent communication with that which, if not life itself, still has more of the ear of life, and comes nearer to its royal person than anything else does. Indeed that this is Professor Allman’s opinion appears from the passage on page 26 of the report, in which he says that in “protoplasm we find the only form of matter in which life can manifest itself.”
According to this view the skin and other tissues are supposed to be made from dead protoplasm which living protoplasm turns to account as the British Museum authorities are believed to stuff their new specimens with the skins of old ones; the matter used by the living protoplasm for this purpose is held to be entirely foreign to protoplasm itself, and no more capable of acting in concert with it than bricks can understand and act in concert with the bricklayer. As the bricklayer is held to be living and the bricks non-living, so the bones and skin which protoplasm is supposed to construct are held non-living and the protoplasm alone living. Protoplasm, it is said, goes about masked behind the clothes or habits which it has fashioned. It has habited itself as animals and plants, and we have mistaken the garment for the wearer—as our dogs and cats doubtless think with Giordano Bruno that our boots live when we are wearing them, and that we keep spare paws in our bedrooms which lie by the wall and go to sleep when we have not got them on.
If, in answer to the assertion that the osseous parts of bone are non-living, it is said that they must be living, for they heal if broken, which no dead matter can do, it is answered that the broken pieces of bone do not grow together; they are mended by the protoplasm which permeates the Haversian canals; the bones themselves are no more living merely because they are tenanted by something which really does live, than a house lives because men and women inhabit it; and if a bone is repaired, it no more repairs itself than a house can be said to have repaired itself because its owner has sent for the bricklayer and seen that what was wanted was done.
We do not know, it is said, by what means the structureless viscid substance which we call protoplasm can build for itself a solid bone; we do not understand how an amœba makes its test; no one understands how anything is done unless he can do it himself; and even then he probably does not know how he has done it. Set a man who has never painted, to watch Rembrandt paint the Burgomaster Six, and he will no more understand how Rembrandt can have done it, than we can understand how the amœba makes its test, or the protoplasm cements two broken ends of a piece of bone. Ces choses se font mais ne s’expliquent pas. So some denizen of another planet looking at our earth through a telescope which showed him much, but still not quite enough, and seeing the St. Gothard tunnel plumb on end so that he could not see the holes of entry and exit, would think the trains there a kind of caterpillar which went through the mountain by a pure effort of the will—that enabled them in some mysterious way to disregard material obstacles and dispense with material means. We know, of course, that it is not so, and that exemption from the toil attendant on material obstacles has been compounded for, in the ordinary way, by the single payment of a tunnel; and so with the cementing of a bone, our biologists say that the protoplasm, which is alone living, cements it much as a man might mend a piece of broken china, but that it works by methods and processes which elude us, even as the holes of the St. Gothard tunnel may be supposed to elude a denizen of another world.