Extra Physics and the Mystery of Creation. (Hodder and Stoughton.)
—This is an attack on the physicists, specially on Professor Tyndal, " their great High Priest." The author tries to wring out of his admissions the notion of a "free human soul," to assume which is, according to the Professor, merely "to explain the unknown in terms of the more unknown " (obscurum per obscurius). Given the facts of consciousness and of volition, we are carried, it is argued, by an intellectual necessity to the hypothesis of an entity, which the instincts of mankind have led them to speak of as "the soul," meaning by that, something distinct from, and independent of any, physical organism. This, the author maintains, is the only possible conclusion to be drawn from Professor Tyndal's admission that we encounter a blank in passing from physical processes to states of consciousness. The inference is that consciousness is extra-physical, as also must be that will-power which rules our physical organism. In fact, there is an extra-physical universe, and to this hypothesis we are forcibly driven, as Professor Tyndal im- plicitly admits it. So argues our author. With his general line of argument we are disposed to agree, as we suppose that possibly Pro- fessor Tyndal himself would not violently quarrel with it, though very likely he would say that we are building in the air. The author would reply that the extra-physical is absolutely forced upon us, and that our minds are so constituted that we cannot escape from it. He dwells at some length on the sense of responsibility, of which we can give but a very poor account, with the mere aid of "molecular puppet-strings." Certainly this does point in an extra- physical direction, but every one knows that it is often ingeniously, and more often without any ingenuity, explained away.
Previous page
