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The very protoplasmic cells from which we sprang could love. The time will come, perhaps, when, having chipped away the lies and faced the truth, we shall find reality a thousand times more pleasing than any fiction. Love is something real and wonderful, and in a natural world we shall have passed through the blood-splashed gates of Passion and be calm.
Protoplasmic pleasures and strains may be the substance of consciousness; and as matter seeks its own level, and as the sea and the flat waste to which all dust returns have a certain primordial life and a certain sublimity, so all passions and ideas, when spent, may rejoin the basal note of feeling, and enlarge their volume as they lose their form.
If then "every portion of a protoplasmic body immediately surrounds itself, when it becomes isolated, with such a skin," which is shown in all cases to arise at the surface of contact with sap or water, this primary differentiation of outer from inner must be ascribed to the direct action of the medium.
Preceding the forms of life which now exist, our observer would see animals and plants not identical with them, but like them: increasing their differences with their antiquity, and at the same time becoming simpler and simpler; until, finally, the world of life would present nothing but that undifferentiated protoplasmic matter which, so far as our present knowledge goes, is the common foundation of all vital activity.
"Dead matter," whatever the phrase may imply, can bear nothing, produce nothing, quicken nothing. The pangs of death once past, the pangs of life cease. Nor is there any birth from unquickened matter. Animals bear young, trees bear fruit, but force produces results. What then quickens protoplasmic matter? Neither vital force, nor vegetative force, if we are to credit the materialists.
The microscope has told us plainly that these fundamental principles are based upon machinery. Whether these statements are strictly accurate in detail does not particularly affect the general conclusion. It is clearly enough demonstrated that the activities of the protoplasmic body are dependent upon the relation of its different parts.
When the caterpillar is just ready to turn into a butterfly it lies by for a while, full of internal commotion, and feels all its organs slowly melting one by one into a sort of indistinguishable protoplasmic pulp; chaos precedes the definite re-establishment of a fresh form of order.
The numerous filaments came to be known as protoplasmic processes; the other fibre was named, after its discoverer, the axis cylinder of Deiters.
"Listen," he said at last, his voice so hoarse as to be almost unrecognizable, "listen can you reverse that process?" Matt nodded, and pointed to the viscous deposit in the dome of the bell. "The protoplasmic substance is still there.
The body consists of a soft granular protoplasmic substance, the middle of which is occupied by a large oval mass called the "nucleus"; while, at its hinder end, is a "contractile vacuole," conspicuous by its regular rhythmic appearances and disappearances. Obviously, although the Colpoda is not a monad, it differs from one only in subordinate details.
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