PROFESSOR TYNDALL ON MATERIALISM.
DERHAPS it is our own fault that the moment Professor 1 Tyndall leaves physical philosophy, and betakes himself to the theologic or metaphysical assumptions which underlie it, we never fail to be bewildered as to what his meaning really is. He con- tributes, for instance, an essay to the November number of the Fortnightly, subsequently to appear, we are told, as a preface to his forthcoming "Fragments of Science," which, clear as is the style of its individual sentences, and clever as are certain of its sar- casms, appears to us to remain one of the obscurest riddles in modern literature, when, even after perusing it two or three times, Ave lay it down, and ask what, then, really is its drift and teaching? We will attempt to state its main positions in Professor Tyndall's own words, and then to show the exceeding difficulty of understand- ing what jointly they amount to. The Professor is answering the various critics of his Belfast address,—chief among them Mr. Mar- tineau, on whom he expends the main portion of his philosophical ammunition. Now, if we understand him rightly, he has two com- p!aints to make against the ablest of these critics. In the first place, they misunderstood him to say, without his having given any ex- cuse for such a misunderstanding, that he can " explain " mind from matter. On the contrary, he maintains and proves somewhat elaborately that he has always said just the contrary, that even granting you could know absolutely the physical conditions of the molecules of the brain which correspond to each condition of con- sciousness,—to each thought, feeling, hope, perception, imagination, &c.,—you would not be a tittle nearer towards bridging the impass- able chasm between a state of matter and a state of mind. "You cannot," he quotes from himself, "satisfy the human understand- ing in its demand for logical continuity between molecular pro- cesses and the phenomena of the human mind. This is a rock on which materialism must inevitably split, whenever it pretends to be a complete philosophy of the human mind." Well, then, here is Professor Tyndall's first position. Whatever strength there may be in materialism, here is one great and impassable flaw in it. It cannot get out of itself. It cannot bridge the golf between matter and consciousness. If it proposes to do so, it is making a vain boast which it cannot sustain. So far then, Professor Tyndall is not a materialist. He apparently thinks it much more promising to investigate phy- sical phenomena separately and merzhtl phenomena separately, than to try to explain the passage from the one to the other ; but as there is a whole class of phenomena of the most important kind for which he can find no key in molecular causes, he so far admits, not speculative materialism, but the speculative failure of materialism. But this position is no sooner clearly established in the reader's mind, than, to his bewilderment, he suddenly finds himself overwhelmed by a very different class of equally positive and even tartly and dogmatically stated speculative opinions, such as, for instance, the following Were not man's origin im- plicated, we should accept without a murmur the derivation of animal and vegetable life from what we call inorganic nature. The conclusion of pure intellect points this way, and no other. But this purity is troubled by our interests in this life, and by our hopes and fears regarding the world to come. Reason is traversed by the emo- tions, anger rising in the weaker heads to the height of suggesting that the compendious shooting of the inquirer would be an act agreeable to God and serviceable to men. Our foes are, to some extent, they of our own household, including notonly the ignorant and the passionate, but a minority of minds of high calibre and culture,—lovers of freedom, moreover, who, though its objective hull be riddled by logic, still find the ethic life of their religion un- impaired. But while such considerations ought to influence the form of our argument, and ought to prevent it from ever slipping out of the region of courtesy into that of scorn or abuse, its substance, I think, ought to be maintained and presented in un- mitigated strength." Here Professor Tyndall appears to maintain that "pure intellect" has none of the speculative fault to find with materialism, which he reproached his critics so vehe- mently before for forgetting that he had found with it. The only flaw, he now says, in the materialistic argument is, not its inability to bridge the gulf between molecules and conscious- ness, on which he had previously insisted, but only man's dislike to face the conclusions of pure intellect when they are disagreeable to himself. Here, then, it is only "courtesy," not in the least an intellectual sense of the inadequacy of materialism, which makes Professor Tyndall tender with the anti-materialists. The " ob- jective " truth of their religion has been positively riddled by logic, and if their position be worthy of respect, it is not for any grain of speculative strength in it, but solely because it is the source of a certain 'ethic life' in themselves. That very materialistic argument on the hopeless and ineradicable flaw in which he had previously insisted, when he overwhelmed his critics with reproaches for failing to recognise that he had seen and pointed out its shortcomings, he now finds one of "unmitigated strength."
These discrepancies are pmzling enough, but when we come to consider the sphere assigned by Professor Tyndall in this relation to what he terms the "potency of matter," we are more hope- lessly out of our depth than ever. "Think," he says, "of the acorn, of the earth, and of the solar light and heat,—was ever such necromancy dreamt of as the production of that massive trunk, the swaying boughs, and whispering leaves from the interaction of those three factors ? In this interaction, moreover, consists what we call life." And then he goes on to illustrate this "potency of matter" more elaborately still :— " Consider it for a moment. There is an experiment, first made by Wheatstone, where the music of a piano is transferred from its sound- board, through a thin wooden rod, across several silent rooms in suc- cession, and poured out at a distance from the instrument. The strings of the piano vibrate, not singly, but ten at a time. Every string sub- divides, yielding not one note, but a dozen. All these vibrations and sub- vibrations are crowded together into a bit of deal not more than a quarter of a square inch in section. Yet no note is lost. Each vibration assert--; its individual rights ; and all are, at last, shaken forth into the air by a second sound-board, against which the distant end of the rod presses. Thought ends in amazement when it seeks to realise the motions of that rod as the music flows through it. I turn to my tree and observe its roots, its trunk, its branches, and its leaves. As the rod conveys the music, and yields it up to the distant air, so does the trunk convey the matter and the motion—the shocks and pulses and other vital actions— which eventually emerge in the umbrageous foliage of the tree. I went some time ago through the greenhouse of a friend. He had ferns from Ceylon, the branches of which were in some cases not much thicker than an ordinary pin—hard, smooth, and cylindrical—often leafless for a foot and more. But at the end of every one of them the unsightly twig unlocked the exuberant beauty hidden within it, and broke forth litto a mass of fronds, almost large enough to fill the arms. We stand here upon a higher level of the wonderful : we are conscious of a music subtler than that of the piano, passing unheard through those tiny boughs, and issuing in what Mr. Martineau would opulently call the 'clustered magnificence of the leaves. Does it lessen my amazement to know that every cluster, and every leaf—their form and texture— lie, like the music in the rod, in the molecular structure of these appar- ently insignificant stoma ? Not so."
Now, in that fine passage, Professor Tyndall seems to us to yield all, and more than all, that Mr. Martineau asks, when he chal- lenges the physicist really to explain the universe as a result of 'material' causes. 'Potency,' we suppose, is power ; and 'potency' to do something in the future which is not yet within the reach of actual energy, is power to anticipate the future and to provide for its contingencies. Preparation for con- ditions which are as yet neither present nor, by such minds as ours, even imaginable, implies, of course, a mastery of laws of measure and laws of quality and laws of combination and co-ordination, which involves not only what we call mind, but infinitely more than we call mind. Potency of matter,' in Pro- fessor Tyndall's sense, is matter with most elaborate conditions grafted on it, which have reference to the most distant spaces and the most remote times. Are such conditions conceivable except as proceeding from a being who, in some sense immeasurably higher, rather than lower than ours, knows those distant spaces and distant times for which these conditions are prepared. Take the case of the electrised wire, which differs from other wire only in physical conditions perfectly invisible to any man surveying it, but which were preconceived by him who sent the current through it and by him who marks off its results. Here is a potency of matter' of which we know the precise meaning, and it is a meaning which involves knowledge on the part of him who produced the potency. So in the case of Professor Tyndall's sounding-rod ; it contains now only potencies of sound, which, if the sounding-board at the end be forgotten, may be potencies of sound never likely to reach human ears, and it must have contained once also those potencies of leaf and verdure which Professor Tyndall so eloquently describes in the case of the twig of fern. In this case, then, one set of 'potencies' have never reached their actual efflorescence to human eyes, and have been suc- ceeded by another set of ' potencies ' which may never wield their power of delight for human ears. But is it con- ceivable that, in either case, the 'potencies' were there with- out the power which knew what was in them ? If it takes mind, and very refined mind, like Professor Tyndall's, even to discover these laws of adaptation of distant conditions of space and time to each other, does it not take much more than what man calls mind to embody the laws and keep them at work? It seems to us that in this talk about the 'potency' of matter, Professor Tyndall gives up entirely the materialism for which he argues. Potency is an idea simply, without any meaning except for one who can see both ends of a long chain of complex conditions, and can see that the beginning makes provision for the end. But this is equivalent to mind plus matter, or rather something much more instead of much less than what we call mind, plus matter, and not matter alone. If it takes what we call mind, and mind at a stretch, to adapt the conditions of loco- motion, say, to the conditions of the people who desire to go about a day or two in advance,—it must be something not less, but infinitely greater than mind so stretched, which adapts the conditions of a sun in space to the myriads of lives which will, sooner or later, if scientific evolution be on the right track, be evolved from the conditions so prepared. In that word 'potency,' Professor Tyndall seems to us to have assumed a mental, and excluded a purely material, cause as conclusively,—and let us also say, as unconsciously,—as his 'unsightly twig' assumed its beauty and put off its unsightli- ness when it burst into that "clustered magnificence" of fronds of which he speaks. ' Potency ' assumes the capacity to see present and future at once, and prepare the present, for the future. Matter, as such, can have none but accidental 'potency,'—the potency of changing place when force is forthcoming to change its place. But force acting under rhythmical laws of specific and complex provisions, force moulding and constraining force, till matter gives out music, and beauty, and consciousness, and suffering and joy,—this is all language without meaning, unless you credit the force so at work with all, and much more than all the qualities, which are combined in what we call 'mind.'
And yet Professor Tyndall appears to make it his main charge against Mr. Martineau, that all this inference is a mere feat of feeling,' for which there is no sort of intellectual defence. After explaining that the animal world is a distillation through the vegetable world from inorganic nature, he goes on :—
"From this point of view all three worlds would constitute a unity, in which I picture life as immanent everywhere. Nor am I anxious to shut out the idea that the life here spoken of may be but a subordi- nate part and function of a higher life, as the living, moving blood is subordinate to the living man. I resist no such idea as long as it is not dogmatically imposed. Left for the human mind freely to operate upon, the idea has ethical vitality ; but stiffened into a dogma, the inner force disappears, and the outward yoke of a usurping hierarchy takes its place."
What Professor Tyndall means by ethical vitality' is one of the great mysteries of this beautiful but mysterious paper. We should have said that if there was a word wholly inapplicable to the conception he is here describing it is the word ethical.' We suppose he means by ethical vitality,' that the notion has a charm for us which gives us new impulse, but that it has no basis at all in our pure reason. We should have said just the reverse, There is no 'ethical' vitality in this or any other idea, till you put some moral or spiritual character into it, which hitherto Professor Tyndall has not done. It is to the intellectual nature of man, and to that alone, that this notion appeals with irresistible force. Here is an infinite wealth of minute correspondence between the most distant parts of space and time, which, unless we assume mind, and much snore than human mind, operating in and through what Professor Tyndall calls matter, is simply a miracle of harmonious accidents, of happy rhythm in events which no one ever intended to be linked together, of poetic coincidences and convergencies of energies, the rhyme and music in which no one ever pre-- conceived. And this the imagination of man refuses to conceive. As far as we understand Professor Tyndall, what he calls " feeling " we call "reason," and what he calls pure reason we should call, if we did not feel so much respect for him as a physicist, pure folly. Certainly he is not happy in expounding 'materialism' to his readers, in spite of the fact that he possesses, as he does, the ear of nature, and catches so much more than most of us of her hidden secrets and inspirations.
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