Protoplasm, simple or nucleated, is the formal basis of all life. It is the clay of the potter: which, bake it and paint it as hewill, remains clay, separated by artifice, and not by nature from the commonest brick or sun-dried clod.
To say that mind is a product or function of protoplasm, or of its molecular changes, is to use words to which we can attach no clear conception.
This substance, which is manifold in its forms and protean in its transformations, has, in its state of living matter, one physiological name which has become familiar, that of protoplasm.
It was a reaction from the old idea of "protoplasm", a name which was a mere repository of ignorance.
People have been so busy relating to how I look, it's a miracle I didn't become a self-conscious blob of protoplasm.
Since the first human eye saw a leaf in Devonian sandstone and a puzzled finger reached to touch it, sadness has lain over the heart of man. By this tenuous thread of living protoplasm, stretching backward into time, we are linked forever to lost beaches whose sands have long since hardened into stone. The stars that caught our blind amphibian stare have shifted far or vanished in their courses, but still that naked, glistening thread winds onward. No one knows the secret of its beginning or its end. Its forms are phantoms. The thread alone is real; the thread is life.
The idea of protoplasm, which was really a name for our ignorance, [is] only a little less misleading than the expression "Vital force".
I don't think all life is precious. I know people say that all the time, "Life is precious." I think some life is precious, and some life is just a waste of protoplasm. Start over.
O.K., helplessness is repugnant to me, as a father, as a piece of protoplasm. My parents were activists. I don't believe you can't do anything.
As our mother-earth is a mere speck in the sunbeam in the illimitable universe, so man himself is but a tiny grain of protoplasm in the perishable framework of organic nature.
