etised, seem to exercise "selection"; they do
not attract all substances alike. A speck of protogenal jelly or
sarcode, if alive, shows analogous relations to certain substances; but
the soft yielding tissue allows the part next the attractive matter to
move thereto, and then, by retraction, to draw such matter into the
sarcodal mass, which overspreads, dissolves, and assimilates it. The
term "living" in the one case is correlative with the term "magnetic" in
the other. A man perceives ripe fruit; he stretches out his hand,
plucks, masticates, swallows, and digests it.

The question then arises whether the difference between such series of
actions in the man and the attractive and assimilative movement of the
amaeba be greater or less than the difference between these acts of the
amaeba and the attracting and retaining acts of the magnet.

The question, I think, may be put with some confidence as to the quality
of the ultimate reply whether the amaebal phenomena are so much more
different, or so essentially different, from the magnetic phenomena than
they are from the mammalian phenomena, as to necessitate the invocation
of a special miracle for their manifestation. It is analogically
conceivable that the same cause which has endowed His world with power
convertible into magnetic, electric, thermotic and other forms or modes
of force, has also added the conditions of conversion into the vital
force.

From protozoa or protista to plants and animals the graduation is closer
than from magnetised iron to vitalised sarcode. From reflex acts of the
nervous system animals rise to sentient and volitional ones. And with
the ascent are associated brain-cells progressively increasing in size
and complexity. Thought relates to the "brain" of man as does
electricity to the nervous "battery" of the torpedo; both are forms of
force and the results of action of their respective organs.

Each sensation affects a cerebral fibre, and, in so affecting it, gives
it the faculty of repeating the action, wherein memory consists and
sensation in a dream.

If the hypothesis of an abstract entity produces psychological phenomena
by playing upon the brain as a musician upon his instrument be rejected,
and these phenomena be held to be the result of cerebral actions, an
objection is made that the latter view is "materialistic" and adverse to
the notion of an independent, indivisible, "immaterial," mental
principle or soul.

But in the endeav