PROFESSOR TYNDALL ON THE SPECULATIVE PHILOSOPHY.
[TO THE EDITOR OF TEE "SPECTATOR."]
SIR,—The interest excited by Professor Tyndall's Belfast address does not appear to have abated, if I may judge by the letters of your correspondents. Can you allow me space to add a few re-
flections which the controversy has suggested? In the first place, does it not appear very unfair to speak so harshly of the specula- tive philosophers, as men who have merely wasted precious time in idle dreams—this is the tone in which men of science speak of them—since, according to Professor Tyndall, the experimental method has, after many laborious centuries, proved Democritus and Lucretius to have been in the right? What blame attaches to them, then? Men of genius may assuredly be allowed to sub- mit their reading of the riddle of the Universe to the opinion of their contemporaries, to be confirmed or refuted hereafter, by the slow progress of knowledge, seeking truth by the empirical method, and do not deserve the ridicule which the students of science heap upon them. I am one of those who believe that the further progress of science will remove Democritus and Lucretius from the pinnacle on which the learned Professor has sought to place them, to the detriment of Aristotle ; but that is another question.
And secondly, is not some tribute of admiration due by men of science to the much abused old theologians of the school of Calvin, who, though using another language, have anticipated by three centuries, in their teaching about grace and predestination, the results of modern science as explained by Tyndall and Huxley? Truth, says Professor Huxley, in one of his essays, may be in- differently stated in terms of spirit or in terms of matter. The Calvinist divines have expressed in terms of theology the modern views of unchangeable law in the moral world. Some acknow- ledgment is due by men of science to the genius of these men, though they could Only express their ideas in the language which they had learnt. To teach that a man is predestined to act as the grace of God wills, or that he must act in accordance with the molecular construction of his cerebral matter, amounts iu practice to much the same.—I am, Sir, &c., A.
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