PROFESSOR TYNDALL'S 'POETICAL' SOUL.
[TO TIIE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR.")
Stn,—In your tussle with Professor Tyndall last week, you leave. your adversary on the horns of a dilemma, from which, in the- judgment, we should imagine, of the majority of your readers,.
there can be no logical escape.
Physical and moral necessity, as interpreted by Professor Tyndall, must either accept the existence of the soul, or let it go.
altogether. There is no room for mortal foot between the yes and no of such a subject, and the philosophy which, objects to its existence on materialistic grounds, but would still retain it as a poetical phenomenon, can only be looked.
upon as "the liberation of pent-up" weakness. If matter has to account for everything, it must account for poetry too. The "molecular motion" (we suppose) which produces this poetical consciousness of a soul in the scientific mind is no new thing, and you might have reminded your readers of a similaradmission in the posthumous essays of Mr. John Stuart Mill, in
which the author speaks of the doctrine of the immortality of the soul as probably an illusion, although morally so valuable, that it is better to retain it. It is surely time that all this scientific shuffling and intellectual dishonesty—for it is nothing else—should
be exposed and exploded. What do these admissions moan from such men as Tyndall and Mill? Surely this,—that the Franken- stein automaton so dear to the scientific mind is a creature easily circumvented, but that the living specimen, "fearfully and wonderfully made," as originally turned, out by the hands of its. Creator, is as profound a mystery as ever. Of such philosophers. it may certainly be said,—
" Ils ont ou l'art do bien eonnaltre
L'homme ont Male ii n'ont jarnaia devin6
Ce qu'il est, ni ce qu'il doit etre."
P.5.—Is the writer of your article not in error when he says,- ' As the German thinker said of God, that if He did not exist, it evotad be necessary to invent Him, so we might fairly say of moral approbation and disapprobation " ? The proverb alluded to is, at all events, much better known in its French form ; and besides, Voltaire claims it for his own. "Si .Dieun'existait pas, il faudrait rinventer," occurs in the " lt.pitre h l'Auteur du Livre des Trois Imposteurs," and was so great a favourite with the author, that ihe declared of it, that although he was seldom satisfied with his own poetry, he felt towards this particular verse all the fondness
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