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Professor Gray calls himself, in his latest work, a "convinced theist, and religiously an accepter of the creed commonly called the Nicene." 1 Is there yet any occasion for the disquietude of a free mind holding these views? If the demonstrative evidence in favour of the materialistic form of the theory of evolution is unsatisfactory as presented by Huxley in New York, what shall be said of the subtler procedures of Tyndall's Belfast Address?

Sitting on the Matterhorn on a July day in 1868, Tyndall meditates on the period when the granite was a part of the molten world; thinks then of the nebula from which the molten world originated; and asks next whether the primordial formless fog contained_potentially the sadness with which he regarded the Matterhorn.2 In 1874 he answers, Yes, and concludes that we must recast our definitions of matter and force, since life and thought are the flower of both.

Accordingly, Tyndall's effort is to change the definition of matter. Of the many forms of materialism, his coincides nearest with a tendency which has been gathering strength among physicists for the last hundred years,-to deny that there are two substances in the universe, matter and mind, with opposite qualities, and to affirm that there is but one substance, matter, itself possessed of two sets of properties, or of a physical side and a spiritual side, making up a double-faced unity.3 This is precisely the materialism of Professor Bain of Aberdeen, and of Professor Huxley; and its numerous supporters in England, Scotland, and Germany, are fond of proclaiming that among metaphysicians, as well as among physiologists, it is the growing opinion; and that the arguments to prove the existence of two substances have now entirely lost their validity, and are no longer compatible with ascertained science and clear thinking. Tyndall's speculations as to matter are simply an extension of the hypothesis of evolution, according to the scientific doctrine of uniformity, from the known to the unknown. Back to a primordial germ Darwin is supposed by Tyndall to have traced all organisation: back to the properties of unorganised matter in a primordial nebula Tyndall now traces that germ. Evolution explains everything since the germ. Evolution must be applied to explain as much as possible before the germ. So far as we can test her processes by observation and experiment, Nature is known to proceed by the method of evolution: where we cannot test her processes, analogy requires that we should suppose that she proceeds by the same method. As all the organisations now or in past time on the earth were potentially in the primordial germ, so that germ was potentially in the unorganised particles of the primordial star-dust: in other words, there was latent in matter from the first the power to evolve organisation, thought, emotion, and will. Where matter obtained this power, or whether matter is self-existent, physical science has no means of determining. In the evolution of the universe from a primor

1 Darwiniana, 1876, p. vi.

2 Musings on the Matterhorn, 27th July 1868. Note at end of Tyndall's Address on Scientific Materialism, 19th August 1868.

3 Bain (Professor Alexander), Mind and Body, 1873, pp. 130, 140, 191, 196.

dial haze of matter possessing both physical and spiritual properties, there has been no design other than that implied in the original constitution of the molecular particles. Of course, it is utterly futile to oppose these views as self-contradictory in the light of the established definition of matter.

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Many of the replies made to Professor Tyndall, however, miss the central point in his scheme of thought, and endeavour to show that it is madness to imagine that matter, as now and for centuries defined by science, can evolve organisation and life. But no one has proclaimed the insanity of such a supposition more vigorously than Tyndall has himself. "These evolution notions," he exclaims, "are absurd, monstrous, and fit only for the intellectual gibbet, in relation to the ideas concerning matter which were drilled into us when young." Most assuredly Professor Tyndall does not propose sweep up music with a broom," or "to produce a poem by the explosion of a type foundry." Audacities of that sort are to be left to the La Mettries and Cabanis and Holbachs: they are not attempted even by the Büchners and Carl Vogts and Moleschotts and Du Bois Reymonds, who, with some whom Tyndall too much resembles, are now obsolete or obsolescent in Germany. "If a man is a materialist,' said Professor Tholuck to me once, as we walked up and down a celebrated long arbour in his garden at Halle, "we Germans think he is not educated." In the history of speculation, so many forms of the materialistic theory have perished, that a chance of life for a new form can be found in nothing less fundamental than a change in the definition of matter. Tyndall perceives, as every one must who has any eye for the signs of the times in modern research, that if Waterloos are to be fought between opposing schools of science or between science and theology or philosophy, the majestic line of shock and onset must be this one definition. Either let us open

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our doors freely to the conception of creative acts," he says in the sentence which best indicates his point of view in his Belfast Address, or, abandoning them, let us radically change our notions of matter.' Now, it is singular, and yet not singular, that one can find nowhere in Tyndall's writings the changed definition on which everything turns. The following four propositions, all stated in his own language, taken from different parts of his recent discussions, are the best approach to a definition that I have been able to find in examining all he has ever published on materialism:—

1. "Emotion, intellect, will, and all their phenomena, were once latent in a fiery cloud."2 "I discern in matter the promise and potency of every form and quality of life." 3 "Who will set limits to the possible play of molecules in a cooling planet? Matter is essentially mystical and transcendental."4 2. "Supposing that, in youth, we had been impregnated with the notion of the poet Goethe, instead of the notion of the poet Young, looking at matter not as brute matter, but as the living garment of God, is it not probable that our

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repugnance to the idea of primeval union between spirit and matter might be considerably abated?" 1

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3. Granting the nebula and its potential life, the question, Whence come they? would still remain to baffle and bewilder us. The hypothesis does nothing more than transport the conception of life's origin to an indefinitely distant past.'

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4. "Philosophical defenders of the doctrine of uniformity . . . have as little fellowship with the atheist, who says that there is no God, as with the theist, who professes to know the mind of God. Two things,' said Immanuel Kant, 'fill me with awe: the starry heavens, and the sense of moral responsibility in The scientific investigator finds himself overshadowed by the same awe. "I have noticed during years of self-observation that it is not in hours of clearness and vigour that the doctrine (of materialistic atheism) commends itself to my mind, and that, in the presence of stronger and healthier thought, it ever dissolves and disappears, as offering no solution of the mystery in which we dwell, and of which we form a part."4

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Of the definition of matter implied in these extracts, it must be affirmed,-not that it is new,-for it is simply what the schools call hylozoism, modified by the recent forms of the atomic theory and of the doctrine of evolution, but that it reverses the best established position of science.

1. It denies, and the established definition affirms, that inertia, in the strict sense of the word, is a property of matter.

2. It affirms, and the established definition denies, that matter has power to evolve organisation and vitality.

3. It affirms, and the established definition denies, that matter has power to evolve thought, emotion, conscience, and will.

In the conflict between the established definition of matter and Tyndall's definition, I, for one, prefer the established, for the following reasons:

1. If inertia is a property of matter, the power to evolve organisation, life, and thought, cannot be; but that inertia is a property of matter is a proposition susceptible of overwhelming proof from the necessary beliefs of the mind, from common consent, from the agreement of philosophers in all ages, and from all the results of experiment and observation.

Of course, the logical existence of the alternatives implied in this argument is denied by those who attribute both inertia and spiritual properties to matter as a mystic, transcendental, double-faced unity; but, while they used the word "inertia," their definition of it is not the established one, as is that here employed. By force, I mean that which is expended in producing or resisting motion. By inertia, I mean the incapacity to originate force or motion, or that quality which causes matter, if set in motion without other resistance than itself can supply, to keep on moving for ever; or, if left at rest without other force than its own, to remain at rest for ever. Materialism, hylozoism, and Tyndall's definition of matter, cannot justify themselves, unless it be proved that inertia is not a property of matter. Every student of this theme knows, and in this presence it is 1 Fragments of Science, p. 165. 3 Ibid., p. 167. Additions to the Belfast Address, in Tyndall's authorised edition.

2 Ibid., p. 166.

unnecessary for me to state, what the proofs are that matter cannot move itself. They are far more superabundant and crucial than even those which support the belief in the existence of gravitation. Newton himself did not regard attraction as an essential property of matter; and it was long a debate whether his great generalisation should be named the theory of attraction, or the theory of propulsion. If the established definition of matter, and the consequent proof of the spiritual origin of all force, or of the Divine immanence in natural law, are not to be disestablished until that late day when the proof that inertia is not a property of matter, that is, that matter can move itself, can be put into the form of a syllogism, then the yoke of Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato,-of which Tyndall complains, that, after twenty centuries, it is yet unbroken,-is likely to continue to be what it now is, one of the best examples in history of the survival of the fittest.

2. The established definition of matter rests on facts verifiable by experience; Tyndall's, confessedly, is demanded and supported only by the tendencies of an improved theory of evolution.

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"Those who hold the doctrine of evolution," says Tyndall himself, are by no means ignorant of the uncertainty of their data, and they yield no more to it than a provisional assent. They regard the nebular hypothesis as probable; and, in the utter absence of any evidence to prove the act illegal, they extend the method of nature from the present into the past, and accept as probable the unbroken sequence of development from the nebula to the present time." 1

In his Belfast Adress, Tyndall says, "The strength of the doctrine of evolution consists not in an experimental demonstration, but in its general harmony with the method of Nature as hitherto known.” But his definition of matter rests only on this theory, which, as he admits, is not verified by experiment; while the accepted definition of matter is so verified. It is notoriously to experiment, and to ages of experiment, and to necessary belief itself, that the accepted definition appeals; it is to the exigencies of an unverified, and experimentally unverifiable theory, that Tyndall appeals.

3. According to the doctrines of analogy and uniformity, on which Tyndall relies, matter must be supposed to be inert where we cannot experiment on it, since it is where we can.

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4. Tyndall admits that the manner of the connection between matter and mind is unthinkable, and that, "if we try to comprehend that connection, we sail in a vacuum.' His own definition, therefore, involves propositions which are unthinkable. They must have been reached by sailing through a vacuum, and can be proved only by a similarly adventurous voyage.

Pertinent exceedingly to the criticism of his definition of matter are Tyndall's famous admissions that "molecular groupings and molecular motions explain nothing;" that "the passage from the physics of the brain to the corresponding facts of consciousness is unthinkable;" and that, "if love were known to be associated with a right

1 Fragments of Science, p. 166.

handed spiral motion of the molecules of the brain, and hate with a left-handed, we should remain as ignorant as before as to the cause of the motion."1 If the connection between matter and thought in the brain is so obscure, that neither Tyndall, nor Spencer, nor Bain, calls it the connection of cause and effect, but only that of antecedent and consequent, how can the connection between matter and thought in the nebula be so clear, that Tyndall can discern in it, at that distance, "the promise and potency of every form and quality of life"? How is it that the relations of matter and mind are unthinkable as they exist in the brain, and thinkable as they exist in the nebula? How is it that the nervous vibrations and the corresponding events of consciousness are, as Tyndall believes them to be, simply consecutive, or correlative,-a case of "parallelism without contact," while the matter of the universe, and the life and thought existing in the universe, are so far from being a case of parallelism without contact, that the "potency" of the latter is all in the former ?

5. The established definition of matter will, and Tyndall's will not, bear Tyndall's own test of clear mental presentation.

Bishop Butler shows this well enough, even when Tyndall himself, in the Belfast Address, composes the Bishop's argument. Undoubtedly Tyndall has not laid too much emphasis on the famous German saying, "The true is the clear." But his definition, contemplated with all patience and candour, is clear in neither its affirmations nor its negations; while the established is capable of a coherent presentation in both these respects. So far, indeed, is the Belfast Address from knowing its own opinion, that in one place it says the very existence of matter as a reality outside of the mind is "not a fact, but an inference," thus implying that Tyndall is not sure but that Fichte's idealism may be the truth.

6. The established definition is justified, and Tyndall's is not, by the irresistible testimony of consciousness that the will has efficiency

as a cause.

Dr. W. B. Carpenter, a far better physiologist than Tyndall, and whose work on "Mental Physiology," just issued, is, always excepting Lotze's "Mikrokosmus," the best discussion produced in modern times of the connection between body and mind, analyses elaborately all the latest facts, including Professor Ferrier's proof of the localisation of functions in the brain; but he saves himself, as Lotze does, from fatalism, materialism, hylozoism, and from that definition of matter which Tyndall adopts. He affirms a very broad and sometimes startling doctrine of unconscious cerebration, but finds in the properties of the nervous mechanism no explanation whatever of our consciousness, that, by acts of will, we can originate physical movements, and control the direction of courses of thought. The central part of Tyndall's errors is to be found in his shy treatment of this necessary belief. There results from this shyness his insufficiently clear idea of what he means by causation. Almost while Tyndall was speaking before the British Association at Belfast on atoms, M.

1 Fragments of Science, pp. 120, 121.

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