PROFESSOR TYNDALL'S ADDRESS.
THE "Unknown and the Unknowable" is discovered, and is Matter. That, so far as we understand an argument which is protected and, as it were, spiritualised at one or two points by the admission of a "mystery," is the dreary conclusion which Pro- fessor Tyndall, in his splendid address to the British Association at Belfast, lays before the world as the outcome of his vigorous research. After a long but not tedious historical résumé of the perennial conflict between natural science and the theologies of the world, a clear account of the rise of the doctrine of Evolution, a statement of that dogma of "the conservation of energy" which he accepts much as a Catholic accepts Infallibility—because it must be true, though the evidence is imperfect—the Professor pro- ceeds to declare that the ultimate cosmical force is unknown and unknowable :—" We have the conception that all we see around us, and all we feel within us—the phenomena of physical nature \ as well as those of the human mind—have their unsearchable roots in a cosmical life, if I dare apply the term, an infinitesimal span of which only is offered to the investigation of man. And even this span is only knowable in part. We can trace the develop- ment of a nervous system and correlate with it the parallel pheno- mena of sensation and thought. We see with undoubting cer- tainty that they go hand-in-hand. But we try to soar in a vacuum the moment we seek to comprehend the connection between them. An Archimedean fulcrum is here required which the human mind cannot command, and the effort to solve the problem, to borrow an illustration from an illustrious friend of mine, is like the effort of a man trying to lift himself by his own waistband." The uni- verse is too vast for man to grasp all its conditions—it is but a span one sees—nor will any advance in his powers enable him to grasp them ; and as till they are grasped perfect truth cannot be attained, the ultimate cosmical force must remain un- known and unknowable. Nevertheless, that force is Matter. "Is there not a temptation to close to some extent with Lucretius, when he affirms that 'Nature is seen to do all things spontaneously of herself, without the meddling of the gods ?' or with Bruno, when he declares that Matter is not that mere empty capacity which philosophers have pictured her to be, but the universal mother who brings forth all things as the fruit of her own womb ?' The questions here raised are inevitable. They are approaching us with accelerated speed, and it is not a matter of indifference whether they are introduced with reverence or with irre- verence. Abandoning all disguise, the confession that I feel bound to make before you is that I prolong the vision backward across the boundary of the experimental evidence, and discern in that Matter, which we in our ignorance, and notwithstanding our professed reverence for its Creator, have hitherto covered with opprobrium, the promise and potency of every form and quality of life." True, Matter needs other and wider definitions than it has yet received, definitions less mechanical, and according it wider range ; but still it is Matter, and as we conclude from the tone of the entire lecture, in Professor Tyndall's opinion, self- existent. Any cause for Matter is an inference, a guess, which no scientific man is warranted in making. Life and reason, as well as their instruments, have their origin in Matter, the idea of a separate and immortal reason or soul being, on the whole, inadmissible, though on this point Professor Tyndall— who puts this division of his view into the form of a wonderfully eloquent dialogue between Bishop Butler and a disciple of Lucretius—admits, or seems to admit, a mystery beyond which may lie somewhat of which the human understanding is too feeble to take cognisance. This, however, even if Professor Tyndall really allows so much, is but far-off and unsupported conjecture ; and the teaching of his whole lecture is, that so far as science can ascertain, Matter—expanding that word to include Force as one of its attributes—is the Final Cause. Religion is but man's creation, though, as the desire for religion is one of the inherent forces of the mind, the gratification of that desire, so long as such gratification does not interfere with the paramount claim of science to be free, may often be not only injurious, but highly beneficial. It is good for man to invent a creed. "And if, still unsatisfied, the human mind, with the yearn- ing of a pilgrim for his distant home, will turn to the Mystery from which it has emerged,- seeking so to fashion it as to give unity to thought and faith, so long as this is done, not only without intolerance or bigotry of any kind, but with the enlightened recognition that ultimate fixity of concep- tion is here unattainable, and that each succeeding age must be held free to fashion the mystery in accordance with its own needs, —then, in opposition to all the restrictions of materialism, I would affirm this to be a field for the noblest exercise of what, in contrast with the knowing faculties, may be called the creative faculties of man. Here, however, I must quit a theme too great for me to handle, but which will be handled by the loftiest minds ages after you and I, like streaks of morning cloud, shall have melted into the infinite azure of the past."
Plainer speaking than this can no man desire, and we need not say we have no quarrel with Mr. Tyndall for the plainness of his speech. We rather honour him for the courage which impels him to tell out his real thought, and face whatever of obloquy now attaches—and though little, it is often bitter—to opinions so extreme. If Materialism,—we use the word without endorsing the opprobrium it is supposed to convey—is true, why waste time and energy and character in teaching what we know,
or at least believe, to be so false ? That practice can lead only to a restriction of intellectual effort, or to an intel- lectual hypocrisy even worse in its effects than hypocrisy as to morals. That the result of such a philosophy, if universally accepted, would be evil, or rather, to avoid theolo- gical terminology, would be injurious to human progress, we hare no doubt ; but if it be true, the injury is no argument against its diffusion, for the injury, whatever its amount, is less than that which must proceed from the deliberate lying of the wise, or from the existence of that double creed, an exoteric and an esoteric one, which is the invariable result of their silence, or their limitation of speech to a circle of the initiated. Lucretius denying God and deifying Nature is a safer as well as nobler teacher than the Augur chucklifig in silent scorn as he announces to the mob the Imaginary will of the Gods whom, for him and for them alike, he believes to be non-existent. The evil the Professor will do arises not from any fault of his—save so far as there may be moral fault in accepting such conclusions, a point upon which his conscience, and no other man's, must judge—but from the cowardly subser- -vience to authority which marks some would-be students of science as strongly as ever it marked any students of Theology. There is a class of men among us who are in matters of Science asamenable to authorityas ever were Ultramontanes. and who will accept a decision from Professor Tyndall that the Final Cause is Matter jest as readily and with just as complete a surrender of the right of private judgment as Catholics show when a Pope decides that usury is immoral, or as the Peculiar People show when they let their children die because St. James did not believe in the value of medical advice. If Professor Tyndall affirmed that the Final Cause was heat, they would go about extolling the instinctive -wisdom of the Guebres, and perhaps subscribe for a temple to maintain a perpetual fire. There will, however, be injury to such men, and if only for their sake, it would have been well if Professor Tyndall had, when announcing a conclusion which, it true, is fatal to all religion—for thought evolved from matter is thought without responsibility, and man is necessarily sinless—at all events stated frankly what his opponents would consider the great objections to his theory, had removed at least the primary difficulty, that the reference of all thought to motors apart from the independent and conceivably immortal mind in man, does not, like any other scientific assumption, explain the visible phenomena.
The hypothesis does not, for instance, explain in any way the consciousness of free-will, which is as strong as that consciousness of existence without which it is impossible to reason ; or the in- dependent influence of will, whether free or not, on the brain itself; or above all, the existence of conflicting thoughts, going on in the mind at the same indivisible point of time. If -a consciousness which is universal and permanent is not to be accepted as existing, why should the evidence of the senses, or the decision of reason, or the conclusions of science be accepted either? If the fact, as we should call it, is mere illusion, why is not the evidence for the conservation of energy mere illusion too? Belief in either can only be the result of experience, and the experience as to the one is at least as great as the experience as to the other. Yet as the outcome of material forces, of any clash of atoms, any active relation between the organism and its environ- ments, must be inevitable,—free-will and thought evolved from machinery could not co-exist. The machine may be as fine as the mind can conceive, but still it can only do its natural work, —cannot change its routine, cannot, above all, decline to act, as the mind unquestionably often consciously does. Lucretius, who killed himself to avoid corrupt imaginings, could, had his sanity been perfect, have controlled them,—that is, could have declined to let the mind act as it was going to act ; and in that control is at least an apparent demonstration that he possessed something above the product of any material energies. Professor Tyndall will say that animals show the same will, the dog, for instance, restraining the inclination to snap at food, though his mind, as you can see in his eyes, wants it as much as his body, but what new difficulty does that involve ? Immortality for animals, says Bishop Butler, when he met that dilemma ; and Professor Tyndall accepts that conclusion as only logical ; but where is the logic that requires it ? There is no objec- tion, that we know of, except prejudice, to the immortality of animals high enough in the scale to receive the separate reason, but neither is there any necessity why their separate reason should be deathless or incapable of absorption. The free- will of man does not prove or involve immortality, which must be defended on quite other grounds, though it does prove the exist- ence in man of a force not emanating from material sources. Professor Tyndall says, if there were such a separate reason, it
could not be suspended or thrown into a trance, as it were, W an external accident, but he does not prove that it is. His argument from surgical experience—the apparent suspense of all faculties because a bone presses the brain—only shows that the relation between the soul—to employ the theological and best-known term—and its instrument may be suspended for a time, but &es not prove that the soul ceases even temporarily to be. The electric fluid exists even when the wire which conveys it ceases to be insulated. His moral illustration is stronger, because it carries us to the edge of the region where thought and experience alike begin to fail, but it is not conclusive :— " The brain may change from health to disease, and through such a change the most exemplary man may, be converted into a debauchee or a murderer. My very noble and approved good master [Lucretius] had, as you know, threatenings of lewdness introduced into his brain by his jealous wife's philter ; and sooner than permit himself to run even the risk of yielding to these base promptings, be slew himself. How could the hand of Lucretius have been thus turned against himself, if the real Lucretius remained as before? Can the brain or can it not act in this dis- tempered way without the intervention of the immortal reason? If it can, then it is a prime mover which requires only healthy regulation to render it reasonably self-acting, and there .is no apparent need of your immortal reason at all. If it cannot, then the immortal reason, by its mischievous activity in operating upon a broken instrument, must have the credit of committing every imaginable extravagance and crime." Why should it not have the credit, if the "immortal reason" has full power.? What else but that is the essence of the idea of sin ? If the immortal reason, indeed, has not full power—if, by reason of the imper- fection of the instrument, it cannot, to use ordinary lan- guage, transmit its orders intact, then in the degree to which that transmission is imperfect, there is neither extra- vagance nor crime, but merely action, to that extent morally indifferent. The alternative which the Professor puts down as a reductio ad absurdum is the main assumption not only of every Christian creed, but of every creed that ever existed, is, as we should say, one of the intuitions of which every man inns certain as he is of his legs. In the same way, the existence of conflict in the mind seems to us fatal to any idea that mind is a product of material action alone. The result of the physical brain- process, whatever it is, must surely be a result, and not a struggle of two results, in which one not only gives way, but is extinguished by the other. It is possible to deny that the struggle arises from one and the game operation, although it constantly seems to do so ; but if it does so arise, there must be something in mind other than mental steam arising from physical friction.
Previous page
