Professor Tyndall lectured at Manchester on Wednesday, on Crystalline and
Molecular Force, and took the opportunity of some concluding remarks to distinguish his religious Agnosticism from Atheism :—" He had, not sometimes, but often in the spring- time, watched the advance of the sprouting leaves, and of the grass, and of the flowers, and observed the general joy of opening life in Nature, and he had asked himself this question,—Could it be that there was no being or thing in nature that knew more about these things than he did? Did he in his ignorance repre- sent the highest knowledge of these things existing in this universe ? The man who put that question fairly to himself, if he was not a shallow man, if he was a man capable of being penetrated by profound thought, would never answer the ques- tion by professing that creed of Atheism which had been so lightly attributed to him." That is, Professor Tyndall, as we understand him, has often been filled with doubts,—not of his -own thesis that molecules and molecular forces are the ultimate seed-vessels of human life, mind, and thought,—but as to whether those seed-vessels themselves did not owe their origin to a being who understands and shapes their powers of growth. Well, that is till perfectly consistent with what he said at Belfast. But is Professor T3rndall's peroration perfectly consistent either with that or with any other recent profession of Professor Tyndall's ? "He was afraid that many of the fears which are now entertained on these subjects really had their roots in a kind of scepticism. . . .
He would exhort such men to cast out scepticism, for this fear had its root in scepticism." We confess we don't know what the sentiment of that passage is, if it be not a delicate and refined kind of buncombe. Agnosticism, is scepticism. If Professor Tyndall has his moments of hope that the universe is directed by a Mind, after all, but thinks it a perfectly open question, what can he mean by denouncing scepticism as a btate of mind to be "cast out"? Is there any weakness or cowardice in supposing that the Universe, if it were not under divine government, would ulti- mately come to grief?
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