That which we handle most unglovedly is our food, which we handle with our stomachs rather than with our hands.  Our hands are so thickly encased with skin that protoplasm can hold but small conversation with what they contain, unless it be held for a long time in the closed fist, and even so the converse is impeded as in a strange language; the inside of our mouths is more naked, and our stomachs are more naked still; it is here that protoplasm brings its fullest powers of suasion to bear on those whom it would proselytise and receive as it were into its own communion—­whom it would convert and bring into a condition of mind in which they shall see things as it sees them itself, and, as we commonly say, “agree with” it, instead of standing out stiffly for their own opinion.  We call this digesting our food; more properly we should call it being digested by our food, which reads, marks, learns, and inwardly digests us, till it comes to understand us and encourage us by assuring us that we were perfectly right all the time, no matter what any one might have said, or say, to the contrary.  Having thus recanted all its own past heresies, it sets to work to convert everything that comes near it and seems in the least likely to be converted.  Eating is a mode of love; it is an effort after a closer union; so we say we love roast beef.  A French lady told me once that she adored veal; and a nurse tells her child that she would like to eat it.  Even he who caresses a dog or horse pro tanto both weds and eats it.  Strange how close the analogy between love and hunger; in each case the effort is after closer union and possession; in each case the outcome is reproduction (for nutrition is the most complete of reproductions), and in each case there are residua.  But to return.

I have shown above that one consequence of the attempt so vigorously made a few years ago to establish protoplasm as the one living substance, is the making it clear that the non-protoplasmic parts of the body and the simpler extra-corporeal tools or organs must run on all fours in the matter of livingness and non-livingness.  If the protoplasmic parts of the body are held living in virtue of their being used by something that really lives, then so, though in a less degree, must tools and machines.  If, on the other hand, tools and machines are held non-living inasmuch as they only owe what little appearance of life they may present when in actual use to something else that lives, and have no life of their own—­so, though in a less degree, must the non-protoplasmic parts of the body.  Allow an overflowing aroma of life to vivify the horny skin under the heel, and from this there will be a spilling which will vivify the boot in wear.  Deny an aroma of life to the boot in wear, and it must ere long be denied to ninety-nine per cent. of the body; and if the body is not alive while it can walk and talk, what in the name of all that is unreasonable can be held to be so?