PROFESSOR TYNDALL ON PHYSICAL AND MORAL NECESSITY.
PROFESSOR TYNDALL is a great populariser, and we can- not doubt that his attempt at the Midland Institute on Monday to reason from the principle that the quantity of physical energy in the world is a fixed amount, and that none is ever either lost or gained, to the principle of moral necessity, namely, that every man is merely what his circumstances and his wishes make him, his wishes being as truly circumstances dependent on the hereditary and other conditions of his organisation as any other of the determining forces around him,—may have a great effect on the ripening intelligence of the country, if only from the influence naturally attaching to his name. But though he puts his case with his usual force and vivacity, he adds nothing what- ever to the substance of what has been stated and restated hundreds of times by his predecessors in the same field. Indeed, the force with which he states the case conduces, as all force of statement naturally must, to a clear indication of the points at which his view entirely fails to meet the facts ; and the natural candour of a genuinely scientific man renders the exposition of these glaring de- ficiencies of his view more striking still. We hope, therefore, that those who do not merely accept Professor Tyndall's authority as conclusive, but who go over the same ground without his obvious bias towards the physical explanation of our moral nature, will soon find themselves pulled up by difficulties far more striking than any which are involved in the view of life which Professor Tyndall was endeavouring to refute. These difficulties accord- ingly we shall attempt to point out, and we shall succeed best probably in doing this by humbly following in Professor Tyndall's footsteps, only pushing to their legitimate consequences all the principles of his address.
Professor Tyndall teaches us, then, first, that as a given stock of heat is generated by a given amount of motion, and that the same amount of motion may bo produced by the loss of that stated
- amount of heat, so also the force we employ in muscular exer- tion is the force duo to a given amount of fuel supplied to the body. The oxidation of food within the body leads to the deve- lopment of an exactly equivalent amount of heat, some of it within the body, some of it outside it. " We place food in our stomachs as so much combustible matter. It is first dis- solved by purely chemical processes, and the nutritive fluid is poured into the blood. Then it comes into contact with atmo- spheric oxygen, admitted by the lungs. It unites with oxygen, as wood or coal might unite with it in a furnace, The matter-pro- ducts of the union, if I may use the term, are the same in both cases,—namely, carbonic acid and water. The force-products are also the same, heat within the body, or heat and work outside the body. Thus far, every action of the body belongs to the domain either of physics or of chemistry." Further, Professor Tyndall shows us how the action of the nerves consists in liberating a vast amount of stored force which is latent in the muscles, just as the power of steam is latent in the steam-engine till some one opens a valve which sets the steam to work, or as the electric force is stored in a galvanic battery till some one completes the circuit which sets the battery to work. It is not that the nervous energy directly produces the muscular energy, but that it liberates muscular energy which had been previously stored up. Then Professor Tyndall quotes from Lange the following illustration of this liberation of pent-up force :— " A merchant sits complacently in his easy chair, not knowing whether smoking, sleeping, newspaper-reading, or the digestion of food occupies the largest portion of his personality. A servant enters the room with a telegram bearing the words Antwerp, &c.—Jones and Co. have failed.'—' Tell James to harness the horses.' The servant flies. Up starts the merchant, wide awake, makes a dozen paces through the room, descends to the counting-house, dictates letters and forwards despatches. Ile jumps into his carriage, the horses snort, and their driver is immediately at the Bank, on the Bourse, and among his commercial friends. Before an hour lies elapsed he is again at home, when he throws himself once more into his easy chair, with a deep- drawn sigh, 'Thank God I am protected against the worst I And now for further reflection.' This complex mass of action, emotional, intel- lectual, and mechanical, is evolved by the impact upon the retina of the few peizienisla-mti oanrk,scaolnetaltbditonof, infinitesimal waves of light coming from a
paper. We have, as Lange says, terror, hope, possible ruin, and victory compressed into amomont. What caused the merchant to spring out of his chair ? The contraction of his muscles. What made his muscles contract? An impulse of the nerves, which lifted the proper latch, and liberated the muscular power. Whence this impulse ? From the centre of the nervous system. But how did it originate there ? This is the critical question."
And Professor Tyndall warns us not to assume that it was a soul or intelligence within the body which, stimulated by an act of knowledge and a consequent emotion of apprehension, set all this chain of nervous antecedents and muscular consequents in motion, lest we try to explain the little known by the less known, or indeed, by the absolutely unknown. On the contrary, he assures us, the only scientific procedure is1 to refer this impulse originating in the centre of the nervous system to other changes in nerve-tissue which have preceded it, seeing that all our scientific knowledge teaches us to refer physical effects to physical causes. "Who or what is it," says Professor Tyndall, that sends and receives these mes- sages through the bodily organism ? You picture the muscles as hearkening to the commends sent through the motor-nerves, and you picture the sensor-nerves as the vehicles of incoming in- telligence; are you not bound to supplement this mechanism by the assumption of an entity which uses it ? In other words, are you net forced by your own exposition into the hypothesis of a free
human soul ? That hypothesis is offered as an explanation or simplification of a series of phenomena more or less obscure. But adequate reflection shows that, instead of introducing light into our minds, it increases our darkness. You do not in this case explain the unknown in terms of the known, which, as stated above, is the method of science, but you explain the unknown in terms of the more unknown." '4 The warrant of science extends only to the statement that the terror, hope, sensation, and calculation of Lange's merchant are psychical phenomena, produced by or associated with the mole- cular motion set up by the waves of light in a previously prepared brain." On these principles, then, it is obvious that heat and motion, and nervous action and muscular tissue, and the mode in which touching a valve liberates steam, are all phenomena which are knowable in a sense in which the subject that knows them is not knowable. It is scientific to be quite certain that "a bowler who imparts a velocity of thirty feet to an 8-lb. ball consumes in the act one-tenth of a grain of carbon." But it is thoroughly unscientific to be certain that there is 'some one' who has this knowledge and who acts on it. It is Scientific to be sure of the laws of motion. It is thoroughly un- scientific to be sure of the existence of the person who is thus sure. The self which is the assumed centre of all knowledge, is a mere centre of darkness, and while various true propositions can be stated, the assertion that I or any one can know them to be true is a false and unscientific one, which confounds the relation between phenomena with an unknowable personality that has no relation to them. But then, if there be no true nominative to the verb "to know," does not that throw doubts at least as great on the object of knowledge ? If I seem to myself to have observed and mastered the laws of heat and motion, and am yet going quite astray in assuming that there is any self to master those laws, how am I to be certain that the heat or motion which is the thing I appear to know, has any existence either? Deny all reality, as Professor Tyndall teaches us to do, to the nominative of the sentence, "I know beat and motion," and can any one be sure that the accusatives have any reality either? They exist to me only as they exist in my con- sciousness. But if the very pronoun 'my' is an illusion, how can I be sure that the illusion does not affect all that that little word qualifies '? Expunge the delusive notion that there is really an 4 l,'—there is no need to use the word soul' at all,—to per- ceive, to receive sensations, and to transmit commands, and why should not that which is as closely coupled to this 'I' in the very act of perception, as one end of a stick is to the other end by the stick itself, be rejected with it ? Professor Tyndall is untrue to his own principles. If it is thoroughly unscientific to assume an entity who perceives and feels and wills, it is clearly unscien- tific to assume that there is anything perceived, or felt, or willed, The fictitious character of the whole act of knowledge must surely follow from the fictitious character of the central assumption which gives that act a meaning. If there is no reason to suppose that there is a person to apprehend the external world, there can be no reason to suppose that there is an external world to appre- hend, for it is only through the act,of apprehension that any one even supposes himself to reach it.
Again, Professor Tyndall teaches us that because we cannot pro- duce physical energy, but can only release or direct it, therefore the supposed, human will can play no real part in human affairs,— meaning, as we understand him, that it always takes other phy- sical energy to determine how any special stock of physical energy shall he released or expended, so that it as much depends on the set of the currents in the previously existing physical energy, which valve shall be opened and which kept shut, as it depends on the previous accumulations of such energy how much energy shall emerge when the particular valve is opened. Professor Tyndall following Mill, and other such teachers, warns us that though we can determine our actions according to our wishes, we cannot determine our wishes, these being determined for us by the laws of physical organisation, of hereditary transmission, of social cir- cumstance, and other conditions of our previous life. But as- suming this teaching to be true, whither does it lead us ? Why,
of course, to the doctrine of pure materialism, that physical energy is the primal fount from which all mental phenomena ultimately proceed,—and proceed by an immutable process of evolution. If not only is the stock of physical energy in the universe a fixed stock, but if also the distribution of that stock is absolutely dependent on the character and amount of it, then it is clear there is nowhere for wishes and other such mental phenomena to come out of, except the one stock of physical energy which is the primary assumption with which Professor
Tyndall starts, and it cannot, in his belief, be wholly un- created and self-caused. 'Wishes, motives, volitions, aspira- tions, and the rest, must either be unexplained phenomena somehow due to this primary stock of physical energy, or must be uncaused, which is clearly not Professor Tyndall's view, since he defines science as the effort to ex- plain the unknown by what is better known. If, then, he believes, as we understand him, that physical energy contains within itself the laws and causes of its own distribution, mind is a mere unexplained phenomenon of physics. If that be not true, if 'the whole stock of physical energy in existence' does not regulate its own laws of distribution, then there must be some- thing else which does regulate it, and human will might well be defined as that which, though not able to create physical energy, is able to liberate and direct it in this direction or that, to con- centrate it on one purpose or on another, within certain limits, as it will. Evidently, then, Professor Tyndall either teaches us pure materialism, or leaves us free to believe that though the stock of physical energy in the world is always the same, incapable of increase or decrease, the way in which it is to be applied, whether by one channel to one purpose, or by another channel to another purpose, is left more or less at our disposal. Yet as we understand him, he forbids us to believe either of these alternatives. He wishes us to regard physical energy as containing in itself the precise laws of its own distribution, in one place, and yet forbids us in another to refer consciousness and its states to these laws. Ile says, almost in the same breath, "molecular motion produces consciousness;" and then again, "physical science offers no justifica- tion for the notion that states of consciousness can be generated by molecular motion." Which does he wish us to believe? If the first, then we know what he means, and that it is pure materialism. If the second, he leaves plenty of room for the influence of free- will, in spite of that absolute limitation of the stock of physical energy in the world which he teaches. But it is hardly reasonable to take credit for both assumptions,—that molecular motion is the ultimate cause of everything—and that mental states are not caused by it, any more than it is caused by them.
Still more difficult is it to follow out Professor Tyndall's teaching as to moral necessity, when at length, he has somehow skipped the gulf between physics and morals, and come to assume moral necessity as the truth. He says, very justly, that if the doctrine of Necessity does away with moral responsibility, it yet leaves in all their strength the motives for discouraging actions injurious to society, and encouraging those which are beneficial to society. That is quite true. 13ut Professor Tyndall appears to admit that though we should encourage what we find useful and discourage what is injurious by every means in our power, approbation and dis- approbation are unmeaning, except on that hypothesis of moral freedom which he has rejected. We may visit what is injurious with disagreeable results in order to prevent others doing it, but it is childish to talk of being morally offended with what was as inevitable as the fall of an apple when its stalk breaks. This being granted, then, being shut off from the dispensing of approbation and disapprobation, we shall be unfortunately also shut off from using by far the most powerful of the moral hindrances to wrong and crime. As the German thinker said of God that if He did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him, so we might fairly
say of moral approbation and disapprobation. If they did not exist, we should be Obliged to invent them. Mere bestowal of pleasure or pain would be of little use without that approbation and disapprobation which make the pleasure and pain really effective, and give them their stimulating or deterrent power. It is not shutting up a man in prison, but shutting him up because his action is treated by society as morally disgraceful, which is the formidable thing. Professor Tyndall in giving this up, gives up the very sting of the penalty, and deprives it of more than half its deterrent effect. And as for the preacher,—why, to sup- pose that the preacher could preach against iniquity with good effect, as Professor Tyndall says, after he had ceased to believe that there was such a thing at all as iniquity in any sense except that in which deformity and iniquity are the same, Professor
Tyndall is the most sanguine of men if he thinks so. Indeed the
punishment of persons who are believed to- have been incapable of doing anything but what they did, would soon become as im- possible as it has already become impossible to punish criminal lunatics. Follow Professor Tyndall's principles out to their proper limits, and all punishment, properly so called, would cease. One word more. Why does Professor Tyndall say so airily that he has no objection to talk poetically' of a soul, though he has a strong objection to believe in one really ? "if you are
content to make your soul a poetic rendering of a phenomenon which refuses the yoke of ordinary mechanical laws, I, for one, would not object to this exercise of ideality." But surely he ou,eht to object to it, if it is false and misleading. We mean by the 'self' a real thing, altogether distinguishable from my organisa- tion; and if it is not that, the use of the word 'self,' or ' or 'soul' is not a harmless exercise of "ideality," but a falsehood, and a very dangerous one. We do not understand this liberty granted by Professor Tyndall to tell "poetically" all sorts of fibs which he objects to as matter of serious belief. The belief in the free self is either a most dangerous fiction or the greatest of truths, and Professor Tyndall's willingness to deal with it in a poetic and ideal way, without insisting on the strict truth about it, as it seems to him, is not, we think, quite so catholic a feature of his character, or so creditable to him as he evidently supposes it to be. Let us tell the truth about ourselves, even if that truth be only that there is no truth to tell.
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