Address delivered before the British Assocation assembled at Belfast

By Tyndall

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Title: Address delivered before the British Assocation assembled at Belfast

Author: John Tyndall

Release date: March 20, 2025 [eBook #75664]

Language: English

Original publication: London: Logmans, Green and Co, 1874

Credits: Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE THE BRITISH ASSOCATION ASSEMBLED AT BELFAST ***







  ADDRESS
  DELIVERED BEFORE
  THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION
  ASSEMBLED AT
  BELFAST


  _WITH ADDITIONS_


  BY
  JOHN TYNDALL, F.R.S.
  PRESIDENT



  FIFTH THOUSAND



  LONDON
  LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
  1874




  'There is one God supreme over all gods, diviner than mortals,
  Whose form is not like unto man's, and as unlike his nature;
  But vain mortals imagine that gods like themselves are begotten,
  With human sensations and voice and corporeal members;
  So, if oxen or lions had hands and could work in man's fashion,
  And trace out with chisel or brush their conception of Godhead,
  Then would horses depict gods like horses, and oxen like oxen,
  Each kind the divine with its own form and nature endowing.'

XENOPHANES of Colophon (six centuries B.C.), 'Supernatural Religion,'
Vol. I. p. 76.


'It were better to have no opinion of God at all, than such an
opinion as is unworthy of Him; for the one is unbelief, the other is
contumely.' BACON.




PREFACE.

At the request of my Publishers, strengthened by the expressed desire
of many Correspondents, I reprint, with a few slight alterations,
this Address.

It was written under some disadvantages this year in the Alps, and
sent by instalments to the printer.  When read subsequently it proved
too long for its purpose, and several of its passages were
accordingly struck out.  Some of them are here restored.

It has provoked an unexpected amount of criticism.  This, in due
time, will subside; and I confidently look forward to a calmer future
for a verdict, founded not on imaginary sins, but on the real facts
of the case.

Of the numberless strictures and accusations, some of them exceeding
fierce, of which I have been, and continue to be, the object, I
refrain from speaking at any length.  To one or two of them, however,
out of respect for their sources, I would ask permission briefly to
refer.

An evening paper of the first rank, after the ascription of various
more or less questionable aims and motives, proceeds to the
imputation, that I permitted the cheers of my audience to 'stimulate'
me to the utterance of words which no right-minded man, without a
sense of the gravest responsibility, could employ.  I trust the
author of this charge will allow me in all courtesy to assure him
that the words ascribed by him to the spur of the moment were written
in Switzerland; that they stood in the printed copy of the Address
from which I read; that they evoked no 'cheers,' but a silence far
more impressive than cheers; and that, finally, as regards both
approbation and the reverse, my course had been thought over and
decided long before I ventured to address a Belfast audience.

A writer in a most able theological journal represents me as 'patting
religion on the back.'  The thought of doing so is certainly his, not
mine.  The facts of religious feeling are to me as certain as the
facts of physics.  But the world, I hold, will have to distinguish
between the feeling and its forms, and to vary the latter in
accordance with the intellectual condition of the age.

I am unwilling to dwell upon statements ascribed to eminent men,
which may be imperfectly reported in the newspapers, and I therefore
pass over a recent sermon attributed to the Bishop of Manchester with
the remark, that one engaged so much as he is in busy and, I doubt
not on the whole, beneficent outward life, is not likely to be among
the earliest to discern the more inward and spiritual signs of the
times, or to prepare for the condition which they foreshadow.

In a recent speech at Dewsbury, the Dean of Manchester is reported to
have expressed himself thus:--'The Professor (myself) ended a most
remarkable and eloquent speech by terming himself a material
Atheist.'  My attention was drawn to Dean Cowie's statement by a
correspondent, who described it as standing 'conspicuous among the
strange calumnies' with which my words have been assailed.  For
myself I use no language which could imply that I am hurt by such
attacks.  They have lost their power to wound or injure.  So likewise
as regards a resolution recently passed by the Presbytery of Belfast,
in which Professor Huxley and myself are spoken of as 'ignoring the
existence of God, and advocating pure and simple materialism;' had
the possessive pronoun 'our' preceded 'God,' and had the words 'what
we consider' preceded 'pure,' this statement would have been
objectively true; but to make it so this qualification is required.

Cardinal Cullen, I am told, is also actively engaged in erecting
spiritual barriers against the intrusion of 'Infidelity' into
Ireland.  His Eminence, I believe, has reason to suspect that the
Catholic youth around him are not proof to the seductions of science.
Strong as he is, I believe him to be impotent here.  The youth of
Ireland will imbibe science, however slowly; they will be leavened by
it, however gradually.  And to its inward modifying power among
Catholics themselves, rather than to any Protestant propagandism, or
other external influence, I look for the abatement of various
incongruities; among them, of those mediæval proceedings which, to
the scandal and amazement of our nineteenth century intelligence,
have been revived among us during the last two years.

In connexion with the charge of Atheism, I would make one remark.
Christian men are proved by their writings to have their hours of
weakness and of doubt, as well as their hours of strength and of
conviction; and men like myself share, in their own way, these
variations of mood and tense.  Were the religious views of many of my
assailants the only alternative ones, I do not know how strong the
claims of the doctrine of 'Material Atheism' upon my allegiance might
be.  Probably they would be very strong.  But, as it is, I have
noticed during years of self-observation that it is not in hours of
clearness and vigour that this doctrine commends itself to my mind;
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.

To coarser attacks and denunciations I pay no attention; nor have I
any real reason to complain of revilings addressed to me, which
professing Christians, as could readily be proved, do not scruple to
use towards each other.  The more agreeable task remains to me of
thanking those who have tried, however hopelessly, to keep accusation
within the bounds of justice, and who, privately, and at some risk in
public, have honoured me with the expression of their sympathy and
approval.

JOHN TYNDALL.

  Athenæum Club.
  _September_ 16, 1874.




ADDRESS,

ETC.


An impulse inherent in primeval man turned his thoughts and
questionings betimes towards the sources of natural phenomena.  The
same impulse, inherited and intensified, is the spur of scientific
action to-day.  Determined by it, by a process of abstraction from
experience we form physical theories which lie beyond the pale of
experience, but which satisfy the desire of the mind to see every
natural occurrence resting upon a cause.  In forming their notions of
the origin of things, our earliest historic (and doubtless, we might
add, our prehistoric) ancestors pursued, as far as their intelligence
permitted, the same course.  They also fell back upon experience, but
with this difference--that the particular experiences which furnished
the weft and woof of their theories were drawn, not from the study of
nature, but from what lay much closer to them, the observation of
men.  Their theories accordingly took an anthropomorphic form.  To
supersensual beings, which, 'however potent and invisible, were
nothing but a species of human creatures, perhaps raised from among
mankind, and retaining all human passions and appetites,'[1] were
handed over the rule and governance of natural phenomena.

Tested by observation and reflection, these early notions failed in
the long run to satisfy the more penetrating intellects of our race.
Far in the depths of history we find men of exceptional power
differentiating themselves from the crowd, rejecting these
anthropomorphic notions, and seeking to connect natural phenomena
with their physical principles.  But long prior to these purer
efforts of the understanding the merchant had been abroad, and
rendered the philosopher possible; commerce had been developed,
wealth amassed, leisure for travel and speculation secured, while
races educated under different conditions, and therefore differently
informed and endowed, had been stimulated and sharpened by mutual
contact.  In those regions where the commercial aristocracy of
ancient Greece mingled with its eastern neighbours the sciences were
born, being nurtured and developed by free-thinking and courageous
men.  The state of things to be displaced may be gathered from a
passage of Euripides quoted by Hume.  'There is nothing in the world;
no glory, no prosperity.  The gods toss all into confusion; mix
everything with its reverse, that all of us, from our ignorance and
uncertainty, may pay them the more worship and reverence.'  Now, as
science demands the radical extirpation of caprice and the absolute
reliance upon law in nature, there grew with the growth of scientific
notions a desire and determination to sweep from the field of theory
this mob of gods and demons, and to place natural phenomena on a
basis more congruent with themselves.

The problem which had been previously approached from above was now
attacked from below; theoretic effort passed from the super- to the
sub-sensible.  It was felt that to construct the universe in idea it
was necessary to have some notion of its constituent parts--of what
Lucretius subsequently called the 'First Beginnings.'  Abstracting
again from experience, the leaders of scientific speculation reached
at length the pregnant doctrine of atoms and molecules, the latest
developments of which were set forth with such power and clearness at
the last meeting of the British Association.  Thought, no doubt, had
long hovered about this doctrine before it attained the precision and
completeness which it assumed in the mind of Democritus,[2] a
philosopher who may well for a moment arrest our attention.  'Few
great men,' says Lange, a non-materialist, in his excellent 'History
of Materialism,' to the spirit and to the letter of which I am
equally indebted, 'have been so despitefully used by history as
Democritus.  In the distorted images sent down to us through
unscientific traditions there remains of him almost nothing but the
name of "the laughing philosopher," while figures of immeasurably
smaller significance spread themselves out at full length before us.'
Lange speaks of Bacon's high appreciation of Democritus--for ample
illustrations of which I am indebted to my excellent friend Mr.
Spedding, the learned editor and biographer of Bacon.  It is evident,
indeed, that Bacon considered Democritus to be a man of weightier
metal than either Plato or Aristotle, though their philosophy 'was
noised and celebrated in the schools, amid the din and pomp of
professors.'  It was not they, but Genseric and Attila and the
barbarians, who destroyed the atomic philosophy.  'For at a time when
all human learning had suffered shipwreck these planks of
Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy, as being of a lighter and more
inflated substance, were preserved and came down to us, while things
more solid sank and almost passed into oblivion.'

The son of a wealthy father, Democritus devoted the whole of his
inherited fortune to the culture of his mind.  He travelled
everywhere; visited Athens when Socrates and Plato were there, but
quitted the city without making himself known.  Indeed, the dialectic
strife in which Socrates so much delighted had no charms for
Democritus, who held that 'the man who readily contradicts and uses
many words is unfit to learn anything truly right.'  He is said to
have discovered and educated Protagoras the sophist, being struck as
much by the manner in which he, being a hewer of wood, tied up his
faggots as by the sagacity of his conversation.  Democritus returned
poor from his travels, was supported by his brother, and at length
wrote his great work entitled 'Diakosmos,' which he read publicly
before the people of his native town.  He was honoured by his
countrymen in various ways, and died serenely at a great age.

The principles enunciated by Democritus reveal his uncompromising
antagonism to those who deduced the phenomena of nature from the
caprices of the gods.  They are briefly these:--1. From nothing comes
nothing.  Nothing that exists can be destroyed.  All changes are due
to the combination and separation of molecules.  2. Nothing happens
by chance.  Every occurrence has its cause from which it follows by
necessity.  3. The only existing things are the atoms and empty
space; all else is mere opinion.  4. The atoms are infinite in number
and infinitely various in form; they strike together, and the lateral
motions and whirlings which thus arise are the beginnings of worlds.
5. The varieties of all things depend upon the varieties of their
atoms, in number, size, and aggregation.  6. The soul consists of
fine, smooth, round atoms, like those of fire.  These are the most
mobile of all.  They interpenetrate the whole body, and in their
motions the phenomena of life arise.  The first five propositions are
a fair general statement of the atomic philosophy, as now held.  As
regards the sixth, Democritus made his fine smooth atoms do duty for
the nervous system, whose functions were then unknown.  The atoms of
Democritus are individually without sensation; they combine in
obedience to mechanical laws; and not only organic forms, but the
phenomena of sensation and thought are the result of their
combination.

That great enigma, 'the exquisite adaptation of one part of an
organism to another part, and to the conditions of life,' more
especially the construction of the human body, Democritus made no
attempt to solve.  Empedocles, a man of more fiery and poetic nature,
introduced the notion of love and hate among the atoms to account for
their combination and separation.  Noticing this gap in the doctrine
of Democritus, he struck in with the penetrating thought, linked,
however, with some wild speculation, that it lay in the very nature
of those combinations which were suited to their ends (in other
words, in harmony with their environment) to maintain themselves,
while unfit combinations, having no proper habitat, must rapidly
disappear.  Thus more than 2,000 years ago the doctrine of the
'survival of the fittest,' which in our day, not on the basis of
vague conjecture, but of positive knowledge, has been raised to such
extraordinary significance, had received at all events partial
enunciation.[3]

Epicurus,[4] said to be the son of a poor schoolmaster at Samos, is
the next dominant figure in the history of the atomic philosophy.  He
mastered the writings of Democritus, heard lectures in Athens, went
back to Sarnos, and subsequently wandered through various countries.
He finally returned to Athens, where he bought a garden, and
surrounded himself by pupils, in the midst of whom he lived a pure
and serene life, and died a peaceful death.  Democritus looked to the
soul as the ennobling part of man; even beauty without understanding
partook of animalism.  Epicurus also rated the spirit above the body;
the pleasure of the body was that of the moment, while the spirit
could draw upon the future and the past.  His philosophy was almost
identical with that of Democritus; but he never quoted either friend
or foe.  One main object of Epicurus was to free the world from
superstition and the fear of death.  Death he treated with
indifference.  It merely robs us of sensation.  As long as we are,
death is not; and when death is, we are not.  Life has no more evil
for him who has made up his mind that it is no evil not to live.  He
adored the gods, but not in the ordinary fashion.  The idea of divine
power, properly purified, he thought an elevating one.  Still he
taught, 'Not he is godless who rejects the gods of the crowd, but
rather he who accepts them.'  The gods were to him eternal and
immortal beings, whose blessedness excluded every thought of care or
occupation of any kind.  Nature pursues her course in accordance with
everlasting laws, the gods never interfering.  They haunt

  'The lucid interspace of world and world
  Where never creeps a cloud or moves a wind,
  Nor ever falls the least white star of snow,
  Nor ever lowest roll of thunder moans,
  Nor sound of human sorrow mounts to mar
  Their sacred everlasting calm.'[5]


Lange considers the relation of Epicurus to the gods subjective; the
indication probably of an ethical requirement of his own nature.  We
cannot read history with open eyes, or study human nature to its
depths, and fail to discern such a requirement.  Man never has been,
and he never will be, satisfied with the operations and products of
the Understanding alone; hence physical science cannot cover all the
demands of his nature.  But the history of the efforts made to
satisfy these demands might be broadly described as a history of
errors--the error, in great part, consisting in ascribing fixity to
that which is fluent, which varies as we vary, being gross when we
are gross, and becoming, as our capacities widen, more abstract and
sublime.  On one great point the mind of Epicurus was at peace.  He
neither sought nor expected, here or hereafter, any personal profit
from his relation to the gods.  And it is assuredly a fact that
loftiness and serenity of thought may be promoted by conceptions
which involve no idea of profit of this kind.  'Did I not believe,'
said a great man to me once, 'that an Intelligence is at the heart of
things, my life on earth would be intolerable.'  The utterer of these
words is not, in my opinion, rendered less noble but more noble by
the fact that it was the need of ethical harmony here, and not the
thought of personal profit hereafter, that prompted his observation.

There are persons, not belonging to the highest intellectual zone,
nor yet to the lowest, to whom perfect clearness of exposition
suggests want of depth.  They find comfort and edification in an
abstract and learned phraseology.  To some such people Epicurus, who
spared no pains to rid his style of every trace of haze and
turbidity, appeared, on this very account, superficial.  He had,
however, a disciple who thought it no unworthy occupation to spend
his days and nights in the effort to reach the clearness of his
master, and to whom the Greek philosopher is mainly indebted for the
extension and perpetuation of his fame.  A century and a half after
the death of Epicurus, Lucretius[6] wrote his great poem, 'On the
Nature of Things,' in which he, a Roman, developed with extraordinary
ardour the philosophy of his Greek predecessor.  He wishes to win
over his friend Memnius to the school of Epicurus; and although he
has no rewards in a future life to offer, although his object appears
to be a purely negative one, he addresses his friend with the heat of
an apostle.  His object, like that of his great forerunner, is the
destruction of superstition; and considering that men trembled before
every natural event as a direct monition from the gods, and that
ever-lasting torture was also in prospect, the freedom aimed at by
Lucretius might perhaps be deemed a positive good.  'This terror,' he
says, 'and darkness of mind must be dispelled, not by the rays of the
sun and glittering shafts of day, but by the aspect and the law of
nature.'  He refutes the notion that anything can come out of
nothing, or that that which is once begotten can be recalled to
nothing.  The first beginnings, the atoms, are indestructible, and
into them all things can be resolved at last.  Bodies are partly
atoms, and partly combinations of atoms; but the atoms nothing can
quench.  They are strong in solid singleness, and by their denser
combination all things can be closely packed and exhibit enduring
strength.  He denies that matter is infinitely divisible.  We come at
length to the atoms, without which, as an imperishable substratum,
all order in the generation and development of things would be
destroyed.

The mechanical shock of the atoms being in his view the
all-sufficient cause of things, he combats the notion that the
constitution of nature has been in any way determined by intelligent
design.  The inter-action of the atoms throughout infinite time
rendered all manner of combinations possible.  Of these the fit ones
persisted, while the unfit ones disappeared.  Not after sage
deliberation did the atoms station themselves in their right places,
nor did they bargain what motions they should assume.  From all
eternity they have been driven together, and after trying motions and
unions of every kind, they fell at length into the arrangements out
of which this system of things has been formed.  'If you will
apprehend and keep in mind these things, nature, free at once, and
rid of her haughty lords, is seen to do all things spontaneously of
herself, without the meddling of the gods.'[7]

To meet the objection that his atoms cannot be seen, Lucretius
describes a violent storm, and shows that the invisible particles of
air act in the same way as the visible particles of water.  We
perceive, moreover, the different smells of things, yet never see
them coming to our nostrils.  Again, clothes hung up on a shore which
waves break upon become moist, and then get dry if spread out in the
sun, though no eye can see either the approach or the escape of the
water particles.  A ring, worn long on the finger, becomes thinner; a
water-drop hollows out a stone; the ploughshare is rubbed away in the
field; the street pavement is worn by the feet; but the particles
that disappear at any moment we cannot see.  Nature acts through
invisible particles.  That Lucretius had a strong scientific
imagination the foregoing references prove.  A fine illustration of
his power in this respect is his explanation of the apparent rest of
bodies whose atoms are in motion.  He employs the image of a flock of
sheep with skipping lambs, which, seen from a distance, presents
simply a white patch upon the green hill, the jumping of the
individual lambs being quite invisible.

His vaguely-grand conception of the atoms falling eternally through
space suggested the nebular hypothesis to Kant, its first propounder.
Far beyond the limits of our visible world are to be found atoms
innumerable, which have never been united to form bodies, or which,
if once united, have been again dispersed, falling silently through
immeasurable intervals of time and space.  As everywhere throughout
the All the same conditions are repeated, so must the phenomena be
repeated also.  Above us, below us, beside us, therefore, are worlds
without end; and this, when considered, must dissipate every thought
of a deflection of the universe by the gods.  The worlds come and go,
attracting new atoms out of limitless space, or dispersing their own
particles.  The reputed death of Lucretius, which forms the basis of
Mr. Tennyson's noble poem, is in strict accordance with his
philosophy, which was severe and pure.


During the centuries lying between the first of these three
philosophers and the last, the human intellect was active in other
fields than theirs.  The sophists had run through their career.  At
Athens had appeared Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, who ruined the
sophists, and whose yoke remains to some extent unbroken to the
present hour.  Within this period also the School of Alexandria was
founded, Euclid wrote his 'Elements,' and made some advance in
optics.  Archimedes had propounded the theory of the lever and the
principles of hydrostatics.  Pythagoras had made his experiments on
the harmonic intervals, while astronomy was immensely enriched by the
discoveries of Hipparchus, who was followed by the historically more
celebrated Ptolemy.  Anatomy had been made the basis of Scientific
medicine; and it is said by Draper[8] that vivisection then began.
In fact, the science of ancient Greece had already cleared the world
of the fantastic images of divinities operating capriciously through
natural phenomena.  It had shaken itself free from that fruitless
scrutiny 'by the internal light of the mind alone,' which had vainly
sought to transcend experience and reach a knowledge of ultimate
causes.  Instead of accidental observation, it had introduced
observation with a purpose; instruments were employed to aid the
senses; and scientific method was rendered in a great measure
complete by the union of Induction and Experiment.

What, then, stopped its victorious advance?  Why was the scientific
intellect compelled, like an exhausted soil, to lie fallow for nearly
two millenniums before it could regather the elements necessary to
its fertility and strength?  Bacon has already let us know one cause;
Whewell ascribes this stationary period to four causes--obscurity of
thought, servility, intolerance of disposition, enthusiasm of
temper--and he gives striking examples of each.[9]  But these
characteristics must have had their antecedents in the circumstances
of the time.  Rome and the other cities of the Empire had fallen into
moral putrefaction.  Christianity had appeared, offering the gospel
to the poor, and, by moderation if not asceticism of life,
practically protesting against the profligacy of the age.  The
sufferings of the early Christians, and the extraordinary exaltation
of mind which enabled them to triumph over the diabolical tortures to
which they were subjected,[10] must have left traces not easily
effaced.  They scorned the earth, in view of that 'building of God,
that house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.'  The
Scriptures which ministered to their spiritual needs were also the
measure of their Science.  When, for example, the celebrated question
of antipodes came to be discussed, the Bible was with many the
ultimate court of appeal.  Augustin, who flourished A.D. 400, would
not deny the rotundity of the earth; but he would deny the possible
existence of inhabitants at the other side, 'because no such race is
recorded in Scripture among the descendants of Adam.' Archbishop
Boniface was shocked at the assumption of a 'world of human beings
out of the reach of the means of salvation.'  Thus reined in, Science
was not likely to make much progress.  Later on the political and
theological strife between the Church and civil governments, so
powerfully depicted by Draper, must have done much to stifle
investigation.

Whewell makes many wise and brave remarks regarding the spirit of the
Middle Ages.  It was a menial spirit.  The seekers after natural
knowledge had forsaken that fountain of living waters, the direct
appeal to nature by observation and experiment, and had given
themselves up to the remanipulation of the notions of their
predecessors.  It was a time when thought had become abject, and when
the acceptance of mere authority led, as it always does in science,
to intellectual death.  Natural events, instead of being traced to
physical, were referred to moral causes; while an exercise of the
phantasy, almost as degrading as the spiritualism of the present day,
took the place of scientific speculation.  Then came the mysticism of
the Middle Ages, Magic, Alchemy, the Neo-platonic philosophy, with
its visionary though sublime abstractions, which caused men to look
with shame upon their own bodies as hindrances to the absorption of
the creature in the blessedness of the Creator.  Finally came the
Scholastic philosophy, a fusion, according to Lange, of the
least-mature notions of Aristotle with the Christianity of the West.
Intellectual immobility was the result.  As a traveller without a
compass in a fog may wander long, imagining he is making way, and
find himself after hours of toil at his starting-point, so the
schoolmen, having 'tied and untied the same knots and formed and
dissipated the same clouds,' found themselves at the end of centuries
in their old position.

With regard to the influence wielded by Aristotle in the Middle Ages,
and which, though to a less extent, he still wields, I would ask
permission to make one remark.  When the human mind has achieved
greatness and given evidence of extraordinary power in any domain,
there is a tendency to credit it with similar power in all other
domains.  Thus theologians have found comfort and assurance in the
thought that Newton dealt with the question of revelation, forgetful
of the fact that the very devotion of his powers, through all the
best years of his life, to a totally different class of ideas, not to
speak of any natural disqualification, tended to render him less
instead of more competent to deal with theological and historic
questions.  Goethe, starting from his established greatness as a
poet, and indeed from his positive discoveries in Natural History,
produced a profound impression among the painters of Germany when he
published his 'Farbenlehre,' in which he endeavoured to overthrow
Newton's theory of colours.  This theory he deemed so obviously
absurd that he considered its author a charlatan, and attacked him
with a corresponding vehemence of language.  In the domain of Natural
History Goethe had made really considerable discoveries; and we have
high authority for assuming that, had he devoted himself wholly to
that side of science, he might have reached in it an eminence
comparable with that which he attained as a poet.  In sharpness of
observation, in the detection of analogies, however apparently
remote, in the classification and organization of facts according to
the analogies discerned, Goethe possessed extraordinary powers.
These elements of scientific inquiry fall in with the discipline of
the poet.  But, on the other hand, a mind thus richly endowed in the
direction of natural history may be almost shorn of endowment as
regards the more strictly called physical and mechanical sciences.
Goethe was in this condition.  He could not formulate distinct
mechanical conceptions; he could not see the force of mechanical
reasoning; and in regions where such reasoning reigns supreme he
became a mere _ignis fatuus_ to those who followed him.

I have sometimes permitted myself to compare Aristotle with Goethe,
to credit the Stagirite with an almost superhuman power of amassing
and systematizing facts, but to consider him fatally defective on
that side of the mind in respect to which incompleteness has been
just ascribed to Goethe.  Whewell refers the errors of Aristotle, not
to a neglect of facts, but to 'a neglect of the idea appropriate to
the facts; the idea of Mechanical cause, which is Force, and the
substitution of vague or inapplicable notions, involving only
relations of space or emotions of wonder.'  This is doubtless true;
but the word 'neglect' implies mere intellectual misdirection,
whereas in Aristotle, as in Goethe, it was not, I believe,
misdirection, but sheer natural incapacity which lay at the root of
his mistakes.  As a physicist, Aristotle displayed what we should
consider some of the worst attributes of a modern physical
investigator--indistinctness of ideas, confusion of mind, and a
confident use of language, which led to the delusive notion that he
had really mastered his subject, while he had as yet failed to grasp
even the elements of it.  He put words in the place of things,
subject in the place of object.  He preached Induction without
practising it, inverting the true order of inquiry by passing from
the general to the particular, instead of from the particular to the
general.  He made of the universe a closed sphere, in the centre of
which he fixed the earth, proving from general principles, to his own
satisfaction and to that of the world for near 2,000 years, that no
other universe was possible.  His notions of motion were entirely
unphysical.  It was natural or unnatural, better or worse, calm or
violent--no real mechanical conception regarding it lying at the
bottom of his mind.  He affirmed that a vacuum could not exist, and
proved that if it did exist motion in it would be impossible.  He
determined _à priori_ how many species of animals must exist, and
shows on general principles why animals must have such and such
parts.  When an eminent contemporary philosopher, who is far removed
from errors of this kind, remembers these abuses of the _à priori_
method, he will be able to make allowance for the jealousy of
physicists as to the acceptance of so-called _à priori_ truths.
Aristotle's errors of detail, as shown by Eucken and Lange, were
grave and numerous.  He affirmed that only in man we had the beating
of the heart, that the left side of the body was colder than the
right, that men have more teeth than women, and that there is an
empty space at the back of every man's head.

There is one essential quality in physical conceptions which was
entirely wanting in those of Aristotle and his followers.  I wish it
could be expressed by a word untainted by its associations; it
signifies a capability of being placed as a coherent picture before
the mind.  The Germans express the act of picturing by the word
_vorstellen_, and the picture they call a _Vorstellung_.  We have no
word in English which comes nearer to our requirements than
_Imagination_, and, taken with its proper limitations, the word
answers very well; but, as just intimated, it is tainted by its
associations, and therefore objectionable to some minds.  Compare,
with reference to this capacity of mental presentation, the case of
the Aristotelian who refers the ascent of water in a pump to Nature's
abhorrence of a vacuum, with that of Pascal when he proposed to solve
the question of atmospheric pressure by the ascent of the Puy de
Dome.  In the one case the terms of the explanation refuse to fall
into place as a physical image; in the other the image is distinct,
the fall and rise of the barometer being clearly figured as the
balancing of two varying and opposing pressures.

During the drought of the Middle Ages in Christendom, the Arabian
intellect, as forcibly shown by Draper, was active.  With the
intrusion of the Moors into Spain, he says, order, learning, and
refinement took the place of their opposites.  When smitten with
disease, the Christian peasant resorted to a shrine, the Moorish one
to an instructed physician.  The Arabs encouraged translations from
the Greek philosophers, but not from the Greek poets.  They turned in
disgust 'from the lewdness of our classical mythology, and denounced
as an unpardonable blasphemy all connexion between the impure
Olympian Jove and the Most High God.'  Draper traces still further
than Whewell the Arab elements in our scientific terms, and points
out that the under garment of ladies retains to this hour its Arab
name.  He gives examples of what Arabian men of science accomplished,
dwelling particularly on Alhazen, who was the first to correct the
Platonic notion that rays of light are emitted by the eye.  He
discovered atmospheric refraction, and points out that we see the sun
and the moon after they have set.  He explains the enlargement of the
sun and moon, and the shortening of the vertical diameters of both
these bodies, when near the horizon.  He is aware that the atmosphere
decreases in density with increase of elevation, and actually fixes
its height at 58½ miles.  In the Book of the Balance Wisdom, he sets
forth the connexion between the weight of the atmosphere and its
increasing density.  He shows that a body will weigh differently in a
rare and dense atmosphere: he considers the force with which plunged
bodies rise through heavier media.  He understands the doctrine of
the centre of gravity, and applies it to the investigation of
balances and steelyards.  He recognises gravity as a force, though he
falls into the error of making it diminish simply as the distance
increased, and of making it purely terrestrial.  He knows the
relation between the velocities, spaces, and times of falling bodies,
and has distinct ideas of capillary attraction.  He improved the
hydrometer.  The determination of the densities of bodies as given by
Alhazen approach very closely to our own.  'I join,' says Draper, in
the pious prayer of Alhazen, 'that in the day of judgment the
All-Merciful will take pity on the soul of Abur-Raihân, because he
was the first of the race of men to construct a table of specific
gravities.'  If all this be historic truth (and I have entire
confidence in Dr. Draper), well may he 'deplore the systematic manner
in which the literature of Europe has contrived to put out of sight
our scientific obligations to the Mahommedans.'[11]

The strain upon the mind during the stationary period towards
ultra-terrestrial things, to the neglect of problems close at hand,
was sure to provoke reaction.  But the reaction was gradual; for the
ground was dangerous, a power being at hand competent to crush the
critic who went too far.  To elude this power and still allow
opportunity for the expression of opinion, the doctrine of 'twofold
truth' was invented, according to which an opinion might be held;
'theologically' and the opposite opinion 'philosophically.'[12]  Thus
in the thirteenth century the creation of the world in six days, and
the unchangeableness of the individual soul which had been so
distinctly affirmed by St. Thomas Aquinas, were both denied
philosophically, but admitted to be true as articles of the Catholic
faith.  When Protagoras uttered the maxim which brought upon him so
much vituperation, that' opposite assertions are equally true,' he
simply meant that human beings differed so much from each other that
what was subjectively true to the one might be subjectively untrue to
the other.  The great Sophist never meant to play fast and loose with
the truth by saying that one of two opposite assertions, made by the
same individual, could possibly escape being a lie.  It was not
'sophistry,' but the dread of theologic vengeance that generated this
double dealing with conviction; and it is astonishing to notice what
lengths were possible to men who were adroit in the use of artifices
of this kind.

Towards the close of the stationary period a word-weariness, if I may
so express it, took more and more possession of men's minds.
Christendom had become sick of the School philosophy and its verbal
wastes, which led to no issue, but left the intellect in everlasting
haze.  Here and there was heard the voice of one impatiently crying
in the wilderness, 'Not unto Aristotle, not unto subtle hypothesis,
not unto church, Bible, or blind tradition, must we turn for a
knowledge of the universe, but to the direct investigation of Nature
by observation and experiment.'  In 1543 the epoch-making work of
Copernicus on the paths of the heavenly bodies appeared.  The total
crash of Aristotle's closed universe with the earth at its centre
followed as a consequence, and 'the earth moves!' became a kind of
watchword among intellectual freemen.  Copernicus was Canon of the
Church of Frauenburg, in the diocese of Ermeland.  For
three-and-thirty years he had withdrawn himself from the world and
devoted himself to the consolidation of his great scheme of the solar
system.  He made its blocks eternal; and even to those who feared it
and desired its overthrow it was so obviously strong that they
refrained for a time from meddling with it.  In the last year of the
life of Copernicus his book appeared: it is said that the old man
received a copy of it a few days before his death, and then departed
in peace.

The Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno was one of the earliest
converts to the new astronomy.  Taking Lucretius as his exemplar, he
revived the notion of the infinity of worlds; and, combining with it
the doctrine of Copernicus, reached the sublime generalization that
the fixed stars are suns, scattered numberless through space and
accompanied by satellites, which bear the same relation to them, that
our earth does to our sun, or our moon to our earth.  This was an
expansion of transcendent import; but Bruno came closer than this to
our present line of thought.  Struck with the problem of the
generation and maintenance of organisms, and duly pondering it, he
came to the conclusion that Nature in her productions does not
imitate the technic of man.  Her process is one of unravelling and
unfolding.  The infinity of forms under which matter appears were not
imposed upon it by an external artificer; by its own intrinsic force
and virtue it brings these forms forth.  Matter is not the mere
naked, 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.

This outspoken man was originally a Dominican monk.  He was accused
of heresy and had to fly, seeking refuge in Geneva, Paris, England,
and Germany.  In 1592 he fell into the hands of the Inquisition at
Venice.  He was imprisoned for many years, tried, degraded,
excommunicated, and handed over to the civil power, with the request
that he should be treated gently and 'without the shedding of blood.'
This meant that he was to be burnt; and burnt accordingly he was, on
the 16th of February, 1600.  To escape a similar fate Galileo,
thirty-three years afterwards, abjured, upon his knees, and with his
hand upon the holy gospels, the heliocentric doctrine which he knew
to be true.  After Galileo came Kepler, who from his German home
defied the power beyond the Alps.  He traced out from pre-existing
observations the laws of planetary motion.  Materials were thus
prepared for Newton, who bound those empirical laws together by the
principle of gravitation.

In the seventeenth century Bacon and Descartes, the restorers of
philosophy, appeared in succession.  Differently educated and
endowed, their philosophic tendencies were different.  Bacon held
fast to Induction, believing firmly in the existence of an external
world, and making collected experiences the basis of all knowledge.
The mathematical studies of Descartes gave him a bias towards
Deduction; and his fundamental principle was much the same as that of
Protagoras, who made the individual man the measure of all things.
'I think, therefore I am,' said Descartes.  Only his own identity was
sure to him; and the development of this system would have led to an
idealism in which the outer world would be resolved into a mere
phenomenon of consciousness.  Gassendi, one of Descartes's
contemporaries, of whom we shall hear more presently, quickly pointed
out that the fact of personal existence would be proved as well by
reference to any other act as to the act of thinking.  I eat,
therefore I am; or I love, therefore I am, would be quite as
conclusive.  Lichtenberg showed that the very thing to be proved was
inevitably postulated in the first two words, 'I think;' and that no
inference from the postulate could by any possibility be stronger
than the postulate itself.

But Descartes deviated strangely from the idealism implied in his
fundamental principle.  He was the first to reduce, in a manner
eminently capable of bearing the test of mental presentation, vital
phenomena to purely mechanical principles.  Through fear or love,
Descartes was a good churchman; he accordingly rejects the notion of
an atom, because it was absurd to suppose that God, if he so pleased,
could not divide an atom; he puts in the place of the atoms small
round particles and light splinters, out of which he builds the
organism.  He sketches with marvellous physical insight a machine,
with water for its motive power, which shall illustrate vital
actions.  He has made clear to his mind that such a machine would be
competent to carry on the processes of digestion, nutrition, growth,
respiration, and the beating of the heart.  It would be competent to
accept impressions from the external sense, to store them up in
imagination and memory, to go through the internal movements of the
appetites and passions, the external movement of limbs.  He deduces
these functions of his machine from the mere arrangement of its
organs, as the movement of a clock or other automaton is deduced from
its weights and wheels.  'As far as these functions are concerned,'
he says, 'it is not necessary to conceive any other vegetative or
sensitive soul, nor any other principle of motion or of life, than
the blood and the spirits agitated by the fire which burns
continually in the heart, and which is in no wise different from the
fires which exist in inanimate bodies.'  Had Descartes been
acquainted with the steam-engine, he would have taken it, instead of
a fall of water, as his motive power, and shown the perfect analogy
which exists between the oxidation of the food in the body and that
of the coal in the furnace.  He would assuredly have anticipated
Mayer in calling the blood which the heart diffuses 'the oil of the
lamp of life;' deducing all animal motions from the combustion of
this oil, as the motions of a steam-engine are deduced from the
combustion of its coal.  As the matter stands, however, and
considering the circumstances of the time, the boldness, clearness,
and precision with which he grasped the problem of vital dynamics
constitute a marvellous illustration of intellectual power.[13]

During the Middle Ages the doctrine of atoms had to all appearance
vanished from discussion.  In all probability it held its ground
among sober-minded and thoughtful men, though neither the church nor
the world was prepared to hear of it with tolerance.  Once, in the
year 1348, it received distinct expression.  But retractation by
compulsion immediately followed, and, thus discouraged, it slumbered
till the seventeenth century, when it was revived by a contemporary
and friend of Hobbes and Malmesbury, the orthodox Catholic provost of
Digne, Gassendi.  But before stating his relation to the Epicurean
doctrine, it will be well to say a few words on the effect, as
regards science, of the general introduction of monotheism among
European nations.

'Were men,' says Hume, 'led into the apprehension of invisible
intelligent power by 'contemplation of the works of Nature, they
could never possibly entertain any conception but of one single
being, who bestowed existence and order on this vast machine, and
adjusted all its parts to one regular system.'  Referring to the
condition of the heathen, who sees a god behind every natural event,
thus peopling the world with thousands of beings whose caprices are
incalculable, Lange shows the impossibility of any compromise between
such notions and those of science, which proceeds on the assumption
of never-changing law and causality.  'But,' he continues, with
characteristic penetration, 'when the great thought of one God,
acting as a unit upon the universe, has been seized, the connexion of
things in accordance with the law of cause and effect is not only
thinkable, but it is a necessary consequence of the assumption.  For
when I see ten thousand wheels in motion, and know, or believe, that
they are all driven by one, then I know that I have before me a
mechanism the action of every part of which is determined by the plan
of the whole.  So much being assumed, it follows that I may
investigate the structure of that machine, and the various motions of
its parts.  For the time being, therefore, this conception renders
scientific action free.'  In other words, were a capricious God at
the circumference of every wheel and at the end of every lever, the
action of the machine would be incalculable by the methods of
science.  But the action of all its parts being rigidly determined by
their connexions and relations, and these being brought into play by
a single self-acting driving wheel, then, though this last prime
mover may elude me, I am still able to comprehend the machinery which
it sets in motion.  We have here a conception of the relation of
Nature to its Author which seems perfectly acceptable to some minds,
but perfectly intolerable to others.  Newton and Boyle lived and
worked happily under the influence of this conception; Goethe
rejected it with vehemence, and the same repugnance to accepting it
is manifest in Carlyle.[14]

The analytic and synthetic tendencies of the human mind exhibit
themselves throughout history, great writers ranging themselves
sometimes on the one side, sometimes on the other.  Men of warm
feelings and minds open to the elevating impressions produced by
Nature as a whole, whose satisfaction, therefore, is rather ethical
than logical, lean to the synthetic side; while the analytic
harmonizes best with the more precise and more mechanical bias which
seeks the satisfaction of the understanding.  Some form of pantheism
was usually adopted by the one, while a detached Creator, working
more or less after the manner of men, was often assumed by the other.
Gassendi is hardly to be ranked with either.  Having formally
acknowledged God as the great first cause, he immediately dropped the
idea, applied the known laws of mechanics to the atoms, deducing
thence all vital phenomena.  He defended Epicurus, and dwelt upon his
purity, both of doctrine and of life.  True he was a heathen, but so
was Aristotle.  He assailed superstition and religion, and rightly,
because he did not know the true religion.  He thought that the gods
neither rewarded nor punished, and adored them purely in consequence
of their completeness; here we see, says Gassendi, the reverence of
the child instead of the fear of the slave.  The errors of Epicurus
shall be corrected, the body of his truth retained; and then Gassendi
proceeds, as any heathen might do, to build up the world, and all
that therein is, of atoms and molecules.  God, who created earth and
water, plants and animals, produced in the first place a definite
number of atoms, which constituted the seed of all things.  Then
began that series of combinations and decompositions which goes on at
present, and which will continue in future.  The principle of every
change resides in matter.  In artificial productions the moving
principle is different from the material worked upon; but in Nature
the agent works within, being the most active and mobile part of the
material itself.  Thus, this bold ecclesiastic, without incurring the
censure of the church or the world, contrives to outstrip Mr. Darwin.
The same cast of mind which caused him to detach the Creator from his
universe led him also to detach the soul from the body, though to the
body he ascribes an influence so large as to render the soul almost
unnecessary.  The aberrations of reason were in his view an affair of
the material brain.  Mental disease is brain disease; but then the
immortal reason sits apart, and cannot be touched by the disease.
The errors of madness are errors of the instrument, not of the
performer.

It may be more than a mere result of education, connecting itself
probably with the deeper mental structure of the two men, that the
idea of Gassendi above enunciated is substantially the same as that
expressed by Professor Clerk Maxwell at the close of the very able
lecture delivered by him at Bradford last year.  According to both
philosophers, the atoms, if I understand aright, are the prepared
materials which, formed by the skill of the highest, produce by their
subsequent inter-action all the phenomena of the material world.
There seems to be this difference, however, between Gassendi and
Maxwell.  The one _postulates_, the other _infers_ his first cause.
In his 'manufactured articles,' as he calls the atoms, Professor
Maxwell finds the basis of an induction which enables him to scale
philosophic heights considered inaccessible by Kant, and to take the
logical step from the atoms to their Maker.

Accepting here the leadership of Kant, I doubt the legitimacy of
Maxwell's logic; but it is impossible not to feel the ethic glow with
which his lecture concludes.  There is, moreover, a very noble strain
of eloquence in his description of the steadfastness of the
atoms:--'Natural causes, as we know, are at work, which tend to
modify, if they do not at length destroy, all the arrangements and
dimensions of the earth and the whole solar system.  But though in
the course of ages catastrophes have occurred and may yet occur in
the heavens, though ancient systems may be dissolved and new systems
evolved out of their ruins, the molecules out of which these systems
are built--the foundation stones of the material universe--remain
unbroken and unworn.'

The atomic doctrine, in whole or in part, was entertained by Bacon,
Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Newton, Boyle, and their successors, until
the chemical law of multiple proportions enabled Dalton to confer
upon it an entirely new significance.  In our day there are
secessions from the theory, but it still stands firm.  Loschmidt,
Stoney, and Sir William Thomson have sought to determine the sizes of
the atoms, or rather to fix the limits between which their sizes lie;
while only last year the discourses of Williamson and Maxwell
illustrate the present hold of the doctrine upon the foremost
scientific minds.  In fact, it may be doubted whether, wanting this
fundamental conception, a theory of the material universe is capable
of scientific statement.


Ninety years subsequent to Gassendi the doctrine of bodily
instruments, as it may be called, assumed immense importance in the
hands of Bishop Butler, who, in his famous 'Analogy of Religion,'
developed, from his own point of view, and with consummate sagacity,
a similar idea.  The Bishop still influences superior minds; and it
will repay us to dwell for a moment on his views.  He draws the
sharpest distinction between our real selves and our bodily
instruments.  He does not, as far as I remember, use the word soul,
possibly because the term was so hackneyed in his day as it had been
for many generations previously.  But he speaks of 'living powers,'
'perceiving' or 'percipient powers,' 'moving agents,' 'ourselves,' in
the same sense as we should employ the term soul.  He dwells upon the
fact that limbs may be removed, and mortal diseases assail the body,
the mind, almost up to the moment of death, remaining clear.  He
refers to sleep and to swoon, where the 'living powers' are suspended
but not destroyed.  He considers it quite as easy to conceive of
existence out of our bodies as in them: that we may animate a
succession of bodies, the dissolution of all of them having no more
tendency to dissolve our real selves, or 'deprive us of living
faculties--the faculties of perception and action--than the
dissolution of any foreign matter which we are capable of receiving
impressions from, or making use of for the common occasions of life.'
This is the key of the Bishop's position; 'our organized bodies are
no more a part of ourselves than any other matter around us.'  In
proof of this he calls attention to the use of glasses, which
'prepare objects' for the 'percipient power' exactly as the eye does.
The eye itself is no more percipient than the glass; is quite as much
the instrument of the true self, and also as foreign to the true
self, as the glass is.  'And if we see with our eyes only in the same
manner as we do with glasses, the like may justly be concluded from
analogy of all our senses.'

Lucretius, as you are aware, reached a precisely opposite conclusion;
and it certainly would be interesting, if not profitable, to us all,
to hear what he would or could urge in opposition to the reasoning of
the Bishop.  As a brief discussion of the point will enable us to see
the bearings of an important question, I will here permit a disciple
of Lucretius to try the strength of the Bishop's position, and then
allow the Bishop to retaliate, with the view of rolling back, if he
can, the difficulty upon Lucretius.

The argument might proceed in this fashion:--

'Subjected to the test of mental presentation (_Vorstellung_), your
views, most honoured prelate, would present to many minds a great, if
not an insuperable difficulty.  You speak of "living powers,"
"percipient or perceiving powers," and "ourselves;" but can you form
a mental picture of any one of these apart from the organism through
which it is supposed to act?  Test yourself honestly, and see whether
you possess any faculty that would enable you to form such a
conception.  The true self has a local habitation in each of us; thus
localized, must it not possess a form?  If so, what form?  Have you
ever for a moment realized it?  When a leg is amputated the body is
divided into two parts; is the true self in both of them or in one?
Thomas Aquinas might say in both; but not you, for you appeal to the
consciousness associated with one of the two parts to prove that the
other is foreign matter.  Is consciousness, then, a necessary element
of the true self?  If so, what do you say to the case of the whole
body being deprived of consciousness?  If not, then on what grounds
do you deny any portion of the true self to the severed limb?  It
seems very singular that, from the beginning to the end of your
admirable book (and no one admires its sober strength more than I
do), you never once mention the brain or nervous system.  You begin
at one end of the body, and show that its parts may be removed
without prejudice to the perceiving power.  What if you begin at the
other end, and remove, instead of the leg, the brain?  The body, as
before, is divided into two parts; but both are now in the same
predicament, and neither can be appealed to to prove that the other
is foreign matter.  Or, instead of going so far as to remove the
brain itself, let a certain portion of its bony covering be removed,
and let a rhythmic series of pressures and relaxations of pressure be
applied to the soft substance.  At every pressure "the faculties of
perception and of action" vanish; at every relaxation of pressure
they are restored.  Where, during the intervals of pressure, is the
perceiving power?  I once had the discharge of a large Leyden battery
passed unexpectedly through me: I felt nothing, but was simply
blotted out of conscious existence for a sensible interval.  Where
was my true self during that interval?  Men who have recovered from
lightning-stroke have been much longer in the same state; and indeed
in cases of ordinary concussion of the brain, days may elapse during
which no experience is registered in consciousness.  Where is the man
himself during the period of insensibility?  You may say that I beg
the question when I assume the man to have been unconscious, that he
was really conscious all the time, and has simply forgotten what had
occurred to him.  In reply to this, I can only say that no one need
shrink from the worst tortures that superstition ever invented if
only so felt and so remembered.  I do not think your theory of
instruments goes at all to the bottom of the matter.  A
telegraph-operator has his instruments, by means of which he
converses with the world; our bodies possess a nervous system, which
plays a similar part between the perceiving power and external
things.  Cut the wires of the operator, break his battery,
demagnetize his needle: by this means you certainly sever his
connexion with the world; but inasmuch as these are real instruments,
their destruction does not touch the man who uses them.  The operator
survives, _and he knows that he survives_.  What is it, I would ask,
in the human system that answers to this conscious survival of the
operator when the battery of the brain is so disturbed as to produce
insensibility, or when it is destroyed altogether?

'Another consideration, which you may consider slight, presses upon
me with some force.  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 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 he 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 distempered 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.  I think, if you
will allow me to say so, that the gravest consequences are likely to
flow from your estimate of the body.  To regard the brain as you
would a staff or an eyeglass--to shut your eyes to all its mystery,
to the perfect correlation of its condition and our consciousness, to
the fact that a slight excess or defect of blood in it produces the
very swoon to which you refer, and that in relation to it our meat
and drink and air and exercise have a perfectly transcendental value
and significance--to forget all this does, I think, open a way to
innumerable errors in our habits of life, and may possibly in some
cases initiate and foster that very disease, and consequent mental
ruin, which a wiser appreciation of this mysterious organ would have
avoided.'

I can imagine the Bishop thoughtful after hearing this argument.  He
was not the man to allow anger to mingle with the consideration of a
point of this kind.  After due reflection, and having strengthened
himself by that honest contemplation of the facts which was habitual
with him, and which includes the desire to give even adverse facts
their due weight, I can suppose the Bishop to proceed thus:--'You
will remember that in the "Analogy of Religion," of which you have so
kindly spoken, I did not profess to prove anything absolutely, and
that I over and over again acknowledged and insisted on the smallness
of our knowledge, or rather the depth of our ignorance, as regards
the whole system of the universe.  My object was to show my deistical
friends, who set forth so eloquently the beauty and beneficence of
Nature and the Ruler thereof, while they had nothing but scorn for
the so-called absurdities of the Christian scheme, that they were in
no better condition than we were, and that, for every difficulty
found upon our side, quite as great a difficulty was to be found upon
theirs.  I will now, with your permission, adopt a similar line of
argument.  You are a Lucretian, and from the combination and
separation of insensate atoms deduce all terrestrial things,
including organic forms and their phenomena.  Let me tell you, in the
first instance, how far I am prepared to go with you.  I admit that
you can build crystalline forms out of this play of molecular force;
that the diamond, amethyst, and snow-star are truly wonderful
structures which are thus produced.  I will go further and
acknowledge that even a tree or flower might in this way be
organized.  Nay, if you can show me an animal without sensation, I
will concede to you that it also might be put together by the
suitable play of molecular force.

'Thus far our way is clear; but now comes my difficulty.  Your atoms
are individually without sensation, much more are they without
intelligence.  May I ask you, then, to try your hand upon this
problem?  Take your dead hydrogen atoms, your dead oxygen atoms, your
dead carbon atoms, your dead nitrogen atoms, your dead phosphorus
atoms, and all the other atoms, dead as grains of shot, of which the
brain is formed.  Imagine them separate and sensationless, observe
them running together and forming all imaginable combinations.  This,
as a purely mechanical process, is seeable by the mind.  But can you
see, or dream, or in any way imagine, how out of that mechanical act,
and from these individually dead atoms, sensation, thought, and
emotion are to arise?  Are you likely to extract Homer out of the
rattling of dice, or the Differential Calculus out of the clash of
billiard-balls?  I am not all bereft of this Vorstellungs-Kraft of
which you speak, nor am I, like so many of my brethren, a mere vacuum
as regards scientific knowledge.  I can follow a particle of musk
until it reaches the olfactory nerve; I can follow the waves of sound
until their tremors reach the water of the labyrinth and set the
otoliths and Corti's fibres in motion; I can also visualize the waves
of ether as they cross the eye and hit the retina.  Nay more, I am
able to pursue to the central organ the motion thus imparted at the
periphery, and to see in idea the very molecules of the brain thrown
into tremors.  My insight is not baffled by these physical processes.
What baffles and bewilders me, is the notion that from those physical
tremors things so utterly incongruous with them as sensation,
thought, and emotion can be derived.  You may say, or think, that
this issue of consciousness from the clash of atoms is not more
incongruous than the flash of light from the union of oxygen and
hydrogen.  But I beg to say that it is.  For such incongruity as the
flash possesses is that which I now force upon your attention.  The
flash is an affair of consciousness, the objective counterpart of
which is a vibration.  It is a flash only by your interpretation.
You are the cause of the apparent incongruity, and you are the thing
that puzzles me.  I need not remind you that the great Leibnitz felt
the difficulty which I feel, and that to get rid of this monstrous
deduction of life from death he displaced your atoms by his monads,
which were more or less perfect mirrors of the universe, and out of
the summation and integration of which he supposed all the phenomena
of life--sentient, intellectual, and emotional--to arise.

'Your difficulty, then, as I see you are ready to admit, is quite as
great as mine.  You cannot satisfy the human understanding in its
demand for logical continuity between molecular processes and the
phenomena of consciousness.  This is a rock on which materialism must
inevitably split whenever it pretends to be a complete philosophy of
life.  What is the moral, my Lucretian?  You and I are not likely to
indulge in ill-temper in the discussion of these great topics, where
we see so much room for honest differences of opinion.  But there are
people of less wit or more bigotry (I say it with humility) on both
sides, who are ever ready to mingle anger and vituperation with such
discussions.  There are, for example, writers of note and influence
at the present day who are not ashamed to assume the "deep personal
sin" of a great logician to be the cause of his unbelief in a
theologic dogma.  And there are others who hold that we, who cherish
our noble Bible, wrought as it has been into the constitution of our
forefathers, and by inheritance into us, must necessarily be
hypocritical and insincere.  Let us disavow and discountenance such
people, cherishing the unswerving faith that what is good and true in
both our arguments will be preserved for the benefit of humanity,
while all that is bad or false will disappear.'

I hold the Bishop's reasoning to be unanswerable, and his liberality
to be worthy of imitation.

It is worth remarking that in one respect the Bishop was a product of
his age.  Long previous to his day the nature of the soul had been so
favourite and general a topic of discussion, that, when the students
of the University of Paris wished to know the leanings of a new
Professor, they at once requested him to lecture upon the soul.
About the time of Bishop Butler the question was not only agitated
but extended.  It was seen by the clear-witted men who entered this
arena that many of their best arguments applied equally to brutes and
men.  The Bishop's arguments were of this character.  He saw it,
admitted it, accepted the consequences, and boldly embraced the whole
animal world in his scheme of immortality.

Bishop Butler accepted with unwavering trust the chronology of the
Old Testament, describing it as 'confirmed by the natural and civil
history of the world, collected from common historians, from the
state of the earth, and from the late inventions of arts and
sciences.'  These words mark progress; and they must seem somewhat
hoary to the Bishop's successors of to-day.[15]  It is hardly
necessary to inform you that since his time the domain of the
naturalist has been immensely extended--the whole science of geology,
with its astounding revelations regarding the life of the ancient
earth, having been created.  The rigidity of old conceptions has been
relaxed, the public mind being rendered gradually tolerant of the
idea that not for six thousand, nor for sixty thousand, nor for six
thousand thousand thousand, but for æons embracing untold millions of
years, this earth has been the theatre of life and death.  The riddle
of the rocks has been read by the geologist and palæontologist, from
subcambrian depths to the deposits thickening over the sea-bottoms of
to-day.  And upon the leaves of that stone book are, as you know,
stamped the characters, plainer and surer than those formed by the
ink of history, which carry the mind back into abysses of past time
compared with which the periods which satisfied Bishop Butler cease
to have a visual angle.  The lode of discovery once struck, those
petrified forms in which life was at one time active increased to
multitudes and demanded classification.  They were grouped in genera,
species, and varieties, according to the degree of similarity
subsisting between them.  Thus confusion was avoided, each object
being found in the pigeon-hole appropriated to it and to its fellows
of similar morphological or physiological character.  The general
fact soon became evident that none but the simplest forms of life lie
lowest down, that as we climb higher among the super-imposed strata
more perfect forms appear.  The change, however, from form to form
was not continuous, but by steps--some small, some great.  'A
section,' says Mr. Huxley, 'a hundred feet thick will exhibit at
different heights a dozen species of Ammonite, none of which passes
beyond its particular zone of limestone, or clay, into the zone below
it, or into that above it.' In the presence of such facts it was not
possible to avoid the question:--Have these forms, showing, though in
broken stages and with many irregularities, this unmistakable general
advance, been subjected to no continuous law of growth or variation?
Had our education been purely scientific, or had it been sufficiently
detached from influences which, however ennobling in another domain,
have always proved hindrances and delusions when introduced as
factors into the domain of physics, the scientific mind never could
have swerved from the search for a law of growth, or allowed itself
to accept the anthropomorphism which regarded each successive stratum
as a kind of mechanic's bench for the manufacture of new species out
of all relation to the old.

Biassed, however, by their previous education, the great majority of
naturalists invoked a special creative act to account for the
appearance of each new group of organisms.  Doubtless there were
numbers who were clear-headed enough to see that this was no
explanation at all, that in point of fact it was an attempt, by the
introduction of a greater difficulty, to account for a less.  But
having nothing to offer in the way of explanation, they for the most
part held their peace.  Still the thoughts of reflecting men
naturally and necessarily simmered round the question.  De Maillet, a
contemporary of Newton, has been brought into notice by Professor
Huxley as one who 'had a notion of the modifiability of living
forms.'  In my frequent conversations with him, the late Sir Benjamin
Brodie, a man of highly philosophic mind, often drew my attention to
the fact that, as early as 1794, Charles Darwin's grandfather was the
pioneer of Charles Darwin.[16]  In 1801, and in subsequent years, the
celebrated Lamarck, who produced so profound an impression on the
public mind through the vigorous exposition of his views by the
author of the 'Vestiges of Creation,' endeavoured to show the
development of species out of changes of habit and external
condition.  In 1813 Dr. Wells, the founder of our present theory of
Dew, read before the Royal Society a paper in which, to use the words
of Mr. Darwin, 'he distinctly recognises the principle of natural
selection; and this is the first recognition that has been
indicated.'  The thoroughness and skill with which Wells pursued his
work, and the obvious independence of his character, rendered him
long ago a favourite with me; and it gave me the liveliest pleasure
to alight upon this additional testimony to his penetration.
Professor Grant, Mr. Patrick Matthew, Von Buch, the author of the
'Vestiges,' D'Halloy, and others,[17] by the enunciation of opinions
more or less clear and correct, showed that the question had been
fermenting long prior to the year 1858, when Mr. Darwin and Mr.
Wallace simultaneously but independently placed their closely
concurrent views upon the subject before the Linnean Society.

These papers were followed in 1859 by the publication of the first
edition of 'The Origin of Species.'  All great things come slowly to
the birth.  Copernicus, as I informed you, pondered his great work
for thirty-three years.  Newton for nearly twenty years kept the idea
of Gravitation before his mind; for twenty years also he dwelt upon
his discovery of Fluxions, and doubtless would have continued to make
it the object of his private thought had he not found that Leibnitz
was upon his track.  Darwin for two and twenty years pondered the
problem of the origin of species, and doubtless he would have
continued to do so had he not found Wallace upon his track.[18]  A
concentrated but full and powerful epitome of his labours was the
consequence.  The book was by no means an easy one; and probably not
one in every score of those who then attacked it had read its pages
through, or were competent to grasp their significance if they had.
I do not say this merely to discredit them; for there were in those
days some really eminent scientific men, entirely raised above the
heat of popular prejudice, willing to accept any conclusion that
science had to offer, provided it was duly backed by fact and
argument, and who entirely mistook Mr. Darwin's views.  In fact, the
work needed an expounder; and it found one in Mr. Huxley.  I know
nothing more admirable in the way of scientific exposition than those
early articles of his on the origin of species.  He swept the curve
of discussion through the really significant points of the subject,
enriched his exposition with profound original remarks and
reflections, often summing up in a single pithy sentence an argument
which a less compact mind would have spread over pages.  But there is
one impression made by the book itself which no exposition of it,
however luminous, can convey; and that is the impression of the vast
amount of labour, both of observation and of thought, implied in its
production.  Let us glance at its principles.

It is conceded on all hands that what are called varieties are
continually produced.  The rule is probably without exception.  No
chick and no child is in all respects and particulars the counterpart
of its brother and sister; and in such differences we have 'variety'
incipient.  No naturalist could tell how far this variation could be
carried; but the great mass of them held that never by any amount of
internal or external change, nor by the mixture of both, could the
offspring of the same progenitor so far deviate from each other as to
constitute different species.  The function of the experimental
philosopher is to combine the conditions of nature and to produce her
results; and this was the method of Darwin.[19]  He made himself
acquainted with what could, without any manner of doubt, be done in
the way of producing variation.  He associated himself with
pigeon-fanciers--bought, begged, kept, and observed every breed that
he could obtain.  Though derived from a common stock, the diversities
of these pigeons were such that 'a score of them might be chosen
which, if shown to an ornithologist, and he were told that they were
wild birds, would certainly be ranked by him as well-defined
species.'  The simple principle which guides the pigeon-fancier, as
it does the cattle-breeder, is the selection of some variety that
strikes his fancy, and the propagation of this variety by
inheritance.  With his eye still directed to the particular
appearance which he wishes to exaggerate, he selects it as it
reappears in successive broods, and thus adds increment to increment
until an astonishing amount of divergence from the parent type is
effected.  The breeder in this case does not produce the elements of
the variation.  He simply observes them, and by selection adds them
together until the required result has been obtained.  'No man,' says
Mr. Darwin, 'would ever try to make a fantail till he saw a pigeon
with a tail developed in some slight degree in an unusual manner, or
a pouter until he saw a pigeon with a crop of unusual size.'  Thus
nature gives the hint, man acts upon it, and by the law of
inheritance exaggerates the deviation.

Having thus satisfied himself by indubitable facts that the
organization of an animal or of a plant (for precisely the same
treatment applies to plants) is to some extent plastic, he passes
from variation under domestication to variation under nature.
Hitherto we have dealt with the adding together of small changes by
the conscious selection of man.  Can Nature thus select?  Mr.
Darwin's answer is, 'Assuredly she can.'  The number of living things
produced is far in excess of the number that can be supported; hence
at some period or other of their lives there must be a struggle for
existence; and what is the infallible result?  If one organism were a
perfect copy of the other in regard to strength, skill, and agility,
external conditions would decide.  But this is not the case.  Here we
have the fact of variety offering itself to nature, as in the former
instance it offered itself to man; and those varieties which are
least competent to cope with surrounding conditions will infallibly
give way to those that are most competent.  To use a familiar
proverb, the weakest comes to the wall.  But the triumphant fraction
again breeds to overproduction, transmitting the qualities which
secured its maintenance, but transmitting them in different degrees.
The struggle for food again supervenes, and those to whom the
favourable quality has been transmitted in excess will assuredly
triumph.  It is easy to see that we have here the addition of
increments favourable to the individual still more rigorously carried
out than in the case of domestication; for not only are unfavourable
specimens not selected by nature, but they are destroyed.  This is
what Mr. Darwin calls 'Natural Selection,' which 'acts by the
preservation and accumulation of small inherited modifications, each
profitable to the preserved being.'  With this idea he
interpenetrates and leavens the vast store of facts that he and
others have collected.  We cannot, without shutting our eyes through
fear or prejudice, fail to see that Darwin is here dealing, not with
imaginary, but with true causes; nor can we fail to discern what vast
modifications may be produced by natural selection in periods
sufficiently long.  Each individual increment may resemble what
mathematicians call a 'differential' (a quantity indefinitely small);
but definite and great changes may obviously be produced by the
integration of these infinitesimal quantities through practically
infinite time.

If Darwin, like Bruno, rejects the notion of creative power acting
after human fashion, it certainly is not because he is unacquainted
with the numberless exquisite adaptations on which this notion of a
supernatural artificer has been founded.  His book is a repository of
the most startling facts of this description.  Take the marvellous
observation which he cites from Dr. Crüger, where a bucket with an
aperture, serving as a spout, is formed in an orchid.  Bees visit the
flower: in eager search of material for their combs they push each
other into the bucket, the drenched ones escaping from their
involuntary bath by the spout.  Here they rub their backs against the
viscid stigma of the flower and obtain glue; then against the
pollen-masses, which are thus stuck to the back of the bee and
carried away.  'When the bee, so provided, flies to another flower,
or to the same flower a second time, and is pushed by its comrades
into the bucket, and then crawls out by the passage, the pollen-mass
upon its back necessarily comes first into contact with the viscid
stigma,' which takes up the pollen; and this is how that orchid is
fertilized.  Or take this other case of the _Catasetum_.  'Bees visit
these flowers in order to gnaw the labellum; in doing this they
inevitably touch a long, tapering, sensitive projection.  This, when
touched, transmits a sensation or vibration to a certain membrane,
which is instantly ruptured, setting free a spring, by which the
pollen-mass is shot forth like an arrow in the right direction, and
adheres by its viscid extremity to the back of the bee.'  In this way
the fertilising pollen is spread abroad.

It is the mind thus stored with the choicest materials of the
teleologist that rejects teleology, seeking to refer these wonders to
natural cases.  They illustrate, according to him, the method of
nature, not the 'technic' of a man-like Artificer.  The beauty of
flowers is due to natural selection.  Those that distinguish
themselves by vividly contrasting colours from the surrounding green
leaves are most readily seen, most frequently visited by insects,
most often fertilized, and hence most favoured by natural selection.
Coloured berries also readily attract the attention of birds and
beasts, which feed upon them, spread their manured seeds abroad, thus
giving trees and shrubs possessing such berries a greater chance in
the struggle for existence.

With profound analytic and synthetic skill, Mr. Darwin investigates
the cell-making instinct of the hive-bee.  His method of dealing with
it is representative.  He falls back from the more perfectly to the
less perfectly developed instinct--from the hive-bee to the humble
bee, which uses its own cocoon as a comb, and to classes of bees of
intermediate skill, endeavouring to show how the passage might be
gradually made from the lowest to the highest.  The saving of wax is
the most important point in the economy of bees.  Twelve to fifteen
pounds of dry sugar are said to be needed for the secretion of a
single pound of wax.  The quantities of nectar necessary for the wax
must therefore be vast; and every improvement of constructive
instinct which results in the saving of wax is a direct profit to the
insect's life.  The time that would otherwise be devoted to the
making of wax is now devoted to the gathering and storing of honey
for winter food.  He passes from the humble bee with its rude cells,
through the Melipona with its more artistic cells, to the hive-bee
with its astonishing architecture.  The bees place themselves at
equal distances apart upon the wax, sweep and excavate equal spheres
round the selected points.  The spheres intersect, and the planes of
intersection are built up with thin laminæ.  Hexagonal cells are thus
formed.  This mode of treating such questions is, as I have said,
representative.  He habitually retires from the more perfect and
complex to the less perfect and simple, and carries you with him
through stages of perfecting, adds increment to increment of
infinitesimal change, and in this way gradually breaks down your
reluctance to admit that the exquisite climax of the whole could be a
result of natural selection.

Mr. Darwin shirks no difficulty; and, saturated as the subject was
with his own thought, he must have known better than his critics the
weakness as well as the strength of his theory.  This of course would
be of little avail were his object a temporary dialectic victory
instead of the establishment of a truth which he means to be
ever-lasting.  But he takes no pains to disguise the weakness he has
discerned; nay, he takes every pains to bring it into the strongest
light.  His vast resources enable him to cope with objections started
by himself and others, so as to leave the final impression upon the
reader's mind that, if they be not completely answered, they
certainly are not fatal.  Their negative force being thus destroyed,
you are free to be influenced by the vast positive mass of evidence
he is able to bring before you.  This largeness of knowledge and
readiness of resource render Mr. Darwin the most terrible of
antagonists.  Accomplished naturalists have levelled heavy and
sustained criticisms against him--not always with the view of fairly
weighing his theory, but with the express intention of exposing its
weak points only.  This does not irritate him.  He treats every
objection with a soberness and thoroughness which even Bishop Butler
might be proud to imitate, surrounding each fact with its appropriate
detail, placing it in its proper relations, and usually giving it a
significance which, as long as it was kept isolated, failed to
appear.  This is done without a trace of ill-temper.  He moves over
the subject with the passionless strength of a glacier; and the
grinding of the rocks is not always without a counterpart in the
logical pulverization of the objector.

But though in handling this mighty theme all passion has been
stilled, there is an emotion of the intellect incident to the
discernment of new truth which often colours and warms the pages of
Mr. Darwin.  His success has been great; and this implies not only
the solidity of his work, but the preparedness of the public mind for
such a revelation.  On this head a remark of Agassiz impressed me
more than anything else.  Sprung from a race of theologians, this
celebrated man combated to the last the theory of natural selection.
One of the many times I had the pleasure of meeting him in the United
States was at Mr. Winthrop's beautiful residence at Brookline, near
Boston.  Rising from luncheon, we all halted as if by a common
impulse in front of a window, and continued there a discussion which
had been started at table.  The maple was in its autumn glory; and
the exquisite beauty of the scene outside seemed, in my case, to
interpenetrate without disturbance the intellectual action.
Earnestly, almost sadly, Agassiz turned, and said to the gentlemen
standing round, 'I confess that I was not prepared to see this theory
received as it has been by the best intellects of our time.  Its
success is greater than I could have thought possible.'

In our day grand generalizations have been reached.  The theory of
the origin of species is but one of them.  Another, of still wider
grasp and more radical significance, is the doctrine of the
Conservation of Energy, the ultimate philosophical issues of which
are as yet but dimly seen--that doctrine which 'binds nature fast in
fate' to an extent not hitherto recognized, exacting from every
antecedent its equivalent consequent, from every consequent its
equivalent antecedent, and bringing vital as well as physical
phenomena under the dominion of that law of causal connexion which,
so far as the human understanding has yet pierced, asserts itself
everywhere in nature.  Long in advance of all definite experiment
upon the subject, the constancy and indestructibility of matter had
been affirmed; and all subsequent experience justified the
affirmation.  Later researches extended the attribute of
indestructibility to force.  This idea, applied in the first instance
to inorganic, rapidly embraced organic nature.  The vegetable world,
though drawing almost all its nutriment from invisible sources, was
proved incompetent to generate anew either matter or force.  Its
matter is for the most part transmuted gas; its force transformed
solar force.  The animal world was proved to be equally uncreative,
all its motive energies being referred to the combustion of its food.
The activity of each animal as a whole was proved to be the
transferred activity of its molecules.  The muscles were shown to be
stores of mechanical force, potential until unlocked by the nerves,
and then resulting in muscular contractions.  The speed at which
messages fly to and fro along the nerves was determined, and found to
be, not as had been previously supposed, equal to that of light or
electricity, but less than the speed of a flying eagle.

This was the work of the physicist: then came the conquests of the
comparative anatomist and physiologist, revealing the structure of
every animal, and the function of every organ in the whole biological
series, from the lowest zoophyte up to man.  The nervous system had
been made the object of profound and continued study, the wonderful
and, at bottom, entirely mysterious, controlling power which it
exercises over the whole organism, physical and mental, being
recognized more and more.  Thought could not be kept back from a
subject so profoundly suggestive.  Besides the physical life dealt
with by Mr. Darwin, there is a psychical life presenting similar
gradations, and asking equally for a solution.  How are the different
grades and order of Mind to be accounted for?  What is the principle
of growth of that mysterious power which on our planet culminates in
Reason?  These are questions which, though not thrusting themselves
so forcibly upon the attention of the general public, had not only
occupied many reflecting minds, but had been formally broached by one
of them before the 'Origin of Species' appeared.

With the mass of materials furnished by the physicist and
physiologist in his hands, Mr. Herbert Spencer, twenty years ago,
sought to graft upon this basis a system of psychology; and two years
ago a second and greatly amplified edition of his work appeared.
Those who have occupied themselves with the beautiful experiments of
Plateau will remember that when two spherules of olive-oil, suspended
in a mixture of alcohol and water of the same density as the oil, are
brought together, they do not immediately unite.  Something like a
pellicle appears to be formed around the drops, the rupture of which
is immediately followed by the coalescence of the globules into one.
There are organisms whose vital actions are almost as purely physical
as that of these drops of oil.  They come into contact and fuse
themselves thus together.  From such organisms to others a shade
higher, and from these to others a shade higher still, and on through
an ever-ascending series, Mr. Spencer conducts his argument.  There
are two obvious factors to be here taken into account--the creature
and the medium in which it lives, or, as it is often expressed, the
organism and its environment.  Mr. Spencer's fundamental principle is
that between these two factors there is incessant interaction.  The
organism is played upon by the environment, and is modified to meet
the requirements of the environment.  Life he defines to be 'a
continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations.'

In the lowest organisms we have a kind of tactual sense diffused over
the entire body; then, through impressions from without and their
corresponding adjustments, special portions of the surface become
more responsive to stimuli than others.  The senses are nascent, the
basis of all of them being that simple tactual sense which the sage
Democritus recognised 2,300 years ago as their common progenitor.
The action of light, in the first instance, appears to be a mere
disturbance of the chemical processes in the animal organism, similar
to that which occurs in the leaves of plants.  By degrees the action
becomes localized in a few pigment-cells, more sensitive to light
than the surrounding tissue.  The eye is here incipient.  At first it
is merely capable of revealing differences of light and shade
produced by bodies close at hand.  Followed as the interception of
the light is in almost all cases by the contact of the closely
adjacent opaque body, sight in this condition becomes a kind of
'anticipatory touch.'  The adjustment continues; a slight bulging out
of the epidermis over the pigment-granules supervenes.  A lens is
incipient, and, through the operation of infinite adjustments, at
length reaches the perfection that it displays in the hawk and eagle.
So of the other senses; they are special differentiations of a tissue
which was originally vaguely sensitive all over.

With the development of the senses the adjustments between the
organism and its environment gradually extend in _space_, a
multiplication of experiences and a corresponding modification of
conduct being the result.  The adjustments also extend in _time_,
covering continually greater intervals.  Along with this extension in
space and time the adjustments also increase in specialty and
complexity, passing through the various grades of brute life, and
prolonging themselves into the domain of reason.  Very striking are
Mr. Spencer's remarks regarding the influence of the sense of touch
upon the development of intelligence.  This is, so to say, the
mother-tongue of all the senses, into which they must be translated
to be of service to the organism.  Hence its importance.  The parrot
is the most intelligent of birds, and its tactual power is also
greatest.  From this sense it gets knowledge unattainable by birds
which cannot employ their feet as hands.  The elephant is the most
sagacious of quadrupeds--its tactual range and skill, and the
consequent multiplication of experiences, which it owes to its
wonderfully adaptable trunk, being the basis of its sagacity.  Feline
animals, for a similar cause, are more sagacious than hoofed
animals--atonement being to some extent made, in the case of the
horse, by the possession of sensitive prehensile lips.  In the
Primates the evolution of intellect and the evolution of tactual
appendages go hand in hand.  In the most intelligent anthropoid apes
we find the tactual range and delicacy greatly augmented, new avenues
of knowledge being thus open to the animal.  Man crowns the edifice
here, not only in virtue of his own manipulatory power, but through
the enormous extension of his range of experience, by the invention
of instruments of precision, which serve as supplemental senses and
supplemental limbs.  The reciprocal action of these is finely
described and illustrated.  That chastened intellectual emotion to
which I have referred in connexion with Mr. Darwin is not absent in
Mr. Spencer.  His illustrations possess at times exceeding vividness
and force; and from his style on such occasions it is to be inferred
that the ganglia of this Apostle of the Understanding are sometimes
the seat of a nascent poetic thrill.

It is a fact of supreme importance that actions the performance of
which at first requires even painful effort and deliberation may by
habit be rendered automatic.  Witness the slow learning of its
letters by a child, and the subsequent facility of reading in a man,
when each group of letters which forms a word is instantly, and
without effort, fused to a single perception.  Instance the
billiard-player, whose muscles of hand and eye, when he reaches the
perfection of his art, are unconsciously coördinated.  Instance the
musician, who, by practice, is enabled to fuse a multitude of
arrangements, auditory, tactual, and muscular, into a process of
automatic manipulation.  Combining such facts with the doctrine of
hereditary transmission, we reach a theory of Instinct.  A chick,
after coming out of the egg, balances itself correctly, runs about,
picks up food, thus showing that it possesses a power of directing
its movements to definite ends.  How did the chick learn this very
complex coördination of eye, muscles, and beak?  It has not been
individually taught; its personal experience is _nil_; but it has the
benefit of ancestral experience.  In its inherited organization are
registered all the powers which it displays at birth.  So also as
regards the instinct of the hive-bee, already referred to.  The
distance at which the insects stand apart when they sweep their
hemispheres and build their cells is 'organically remembered.'

Man also carries with him the physical texture of his ancestry, as
well as the inherited intellect bound up with it.  The defects of
intelligence during infancy and youth are probably less due to a lack
of individual experience than to the fact that in early life the
cerebral organization is still incomplete.  The period necessary for
completion varies with the race and with the individual.  As a round
shot outstrips a rifled one on quitting the muzzle of the gun, so the
lower race in childhood may outstrip the higher.  But the higher
eventually overtakes the lower, and surpasses it in range.  As
regards individuals, we do not always find the precocity of youth
prolonged to mental power in maturity; while the dulness of boyhood
is sometimes strikingly contrasted with the intellectual energy of
after years.  Newton, when a boy, was weakly, and he showed no
particular aptitude at school; but in his eighteenth year he went to
Cambridge, and soon afterwards astonished his teachers by his power
of dealing with geometrical problems.  During his quiet youth his
brain was slowly preparing itself to be the organ of those energies
which he subsequently displayed.

By myriad blows (to use a Lucretian phrase) the image and
superscription of the external world are stamped as states of
consciousness upon the organism, the depth of the impression
depending upon the number of the blows.  When two or more phenomena
occur in the environment invariably together, they are stamped to the
same depth or to the same relief, and indissolubly connected.  And
here we come to the threshold of a great question.  Seeing that he
could in no way rid himself of the consciousness of Space and Time,
Kant assumed them to be necessary 'forms of intuition,' the moulds
and shapes into which our intuitions are thrown, belonging to
ourselves solely and without objective existence.  With unexpected
power and success Mr. Spencer brings the hereditary experience
theory, as he holds it, to bear upon this question.  'If there exist
certain external relations which are experienced by all organisms at
all instants of their waking lives--relations which are absolutely
constant and universal--there will be established answering internal
relations that are absolutely constant and universal.  Such relations
we have in those of Space and Time.  As the substratum of all other
relations of the Non-Ego, they must be responded to by conceptions
that are the substrata of all other relations in the Ego.  Being the
constant and infinitely repeated elements of thought, they must
become the automatic elements of thought--the elements of thought
which it is impossible to get rid of--the "forms of intuition."

Throughout this application and extension of the 'Law of Inseparable
Association,' Mr. Spencer stands upon his own ground, invoking,
instead of the experiences of the individual, the registered
experiences of the race.  His overthrow of the restriction of
experience to the individual is, I think, complete.  That restriction
ignores the power of organizing experience furnished at the outset to
each individual; it ignores the different degrees of this power
possessed by different races and by different individuals of the same
race.  Were there not in the human brain a potency antecedent to all
experience, a dog or cat ought to be as capable of education as a
man.  These predetermined internal relations are independent of the
experiences of the individual.  The human brain is the 'organised
register of infinitely numerous experiences received during the
evolution of life, or rather during the evolution of that series of
organisms through which the human organism has been reached.  The
effects of the most uniform and frequent of these experiences have
been successively bequeathed, principal and interest, and have slowly
mounted to that high intelligence which lies latent in the brain of
the infant.  Thus it happens that the European inherits from twenty
to thirty cubic inches more of brain than the Papuan.  Thus it
happens that faculties, as of music, which scarcely exist in some
inferior races, become congenital in superior ones.  Thus it happens
that out of savages unable to count up to the number of their
fingers, and speaking a language containing only nouns and verbs,
arise at length our Newtons and Shakespeares.'


At the outset of this Address it was stated that physical theories
which lie beyond experience are derived by a process of abstraction
from experience.  It is instructive to note from this point of view
the successive introduction of new conceptions.  The idea of the
attraction of gravitation was preceded by the observation of the
attraction of iron by a magnet, and of light bodies by rubbed amber.
The polarity of magnetism and electricity appealed to the senses; and
thus became the substratum of the conception that atoms and molecules
are endowed with definite, attractive, and repellent poles, by the
play of which definite forms of crystalline architecture are
produced.  Thus molecular force becomes _structural_.  It required no
great boldness of thought to extend its play into organic nature, and
to recognize in molecular force the agency by which both plants and
animals are built up.  In this way out of experience arise
conceptions which are wholly ultra-experiential.  None of the
atomists of antiquity had any notion of this play of molecular polar
force, but they had experience of gravity as manifested by falling
bodies.  Abstracting from this, they permitted their atoms to fall
eternally through empty space.  Democritus assumed that the larger
atoms moved more rapidly than the smaller ones, which they therefore
could overtake, and with which they could combine.  Epicurus, holding
that empty space could offer no resistance to motion, ascribed to all
the atoms the same velocity; but he seems to have overlooked the
consequence that under such circumstances the atoms could never
combine.  Lucretius cut the knot by quitting the domain of physics
altogether, and causing the atoms to move together by a kind of
volition.

Was the instinct utterly at fault which caused Lucretius thus to
swerve from his own principles?  Diminishing gradually the number of
progenitors, Mr. Darwin comes at length to one 'primordial form;' but
he does not say, as far as I remember, how he supposes this form to
have been introduced.  He quotes with satisfaction the words of a
celebrated author and divine who had 'gradually learnt to see that it
is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe He created a
few original forms, capable of self-development into other and
needful forms, as to believe that He required a fresh act of creation
to supply the voids caused by the action of His laws.'  What Mr.
Darwin thinks of this view of the introduction of life I do not know.
But the anthropomorphism, which it seemed his object to set aside, is
as firmly associated with the creation of a few forms as with the
creation of a multitude.  We need clearness and thoroughness here.
Two courses and two only, are possible.  Either let us open our doors
freely to the conception of creative acts, or, abandoning them, let
us radically change our notions of Matter.  If we look at matter as
pictured by Democritus, and as defined for generations in our
scientific text-books, the notion of any form of life whatever coming
out of it is utterly unimaginable.  The argument placed in the mouth
of Bishop Butler suffices, in my opinion, to crush all such
materialism as this.  But those who framed these definitions of
matter were not biologists but mathematicians, whose labours referred
only to such accidents and properties of matter as could be expressed
in their formulæ.  The very intentness with which they pursued
mechanical science turned their thoughts aside from the science of
life.  May not their imperfect definitions be the real cause of our
present dread?  Let us reverently, but honestly, look the question in
the face.  Divorced from matter, where is life to be found?  Whatever
our _faith_ may say, our _knowledge_ shows them to be indissolubly
joined.  Every meal we eat, and every cup we drink, illustrates the
mysterious control of Mind by Matter.

Trace the line of life backwards, and see it approaching more and
more to what we call the purely physical condition.  We come at
length to those organisms which I have compared to drops of oil
suspended in a mixture of alcohol and water.  We reach the
_protogenes_ of Haeckel, in which we have 'a type distinguishable
from a fragment of albumen only by its finely granular character.'
Can we pause here?  We break a magnet and find two poles in each of
its fragments.  We continue the process of breaking, but, however
small the parts, each carries with it, though enfeebled, the polarity
of the whole.  And when we can break no longer, we prolong the
intellectual vision to the polar molecules.  Are we not urged to do
_something_ similar in the case of life?  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?'  Believing as I do in the continuity of Nature, I
cannot stop abruptly where our microscopes cease to be of use.  Here
the vision of the mind authoritatively supplements the vision of the
eye.  By an intellectual necessity I cross the boundary of the
experimental evidence, and discern in that Matter which we, in our
ignorance of its latent powers, and notwithstanding our professed
reverence for its Creator, have hitherto covered with opprobrium, the
promise and potency of all terrestial Life.

If you ask me whether there exists the least evidence to prove that
any form of life can be developed out of matter, without demonstrable
antecedent life, my reply is that evidence considered perfectly
conclusive by many has been adduced; and that were some of us who
have pondered this question to follow a very common example, and
accept testimony because it falls in with our belief, we also should
eagerly close with the evidence referred to.  But there is in the
true man of science a wish stronger than the wish to have his beliefs
upheld; namely, the wish to have them true.  And this stronger wish
causes him to reject the most plausible support if he has reason to
suspect that it is vitiated by error.  Those to whom I refer as
having studied this question, believing the evidence offered in
favour of 'spontaneous generation' to be thus vitiated, cannot accept
it.  They know full well that the chemist now prepares from inorganic
matter a vast array of substances which were some time ago regarded
as the sole products of vitality.  They are intimately acquainted
with the structural power of matter as evidenced in the phenomena of
crystallization.  They can justify scientifically their _belief_ in
its potency, under the proper conditions, to produce organisms.  But
in reply to your question they will frankly admit their inability to
point to any satisfactory experimental proof that life can be
developed save from demonstrable antecedent life.  As already
indicated, they draw the line from the highest organisms through
lower ones down to the lowest, and it is the prolongation of this
line by the intellect beyond the range of the senses that leads them
to the conclusion which Bruno so boldly enunciated.[20]

The 'materialism' here professed may be vastly different from what
you suppose, and I therefore crave your gracious patience to the end.
'The question of an external world,' says Mr. J. S. Mill, 'is the
great battleground of metaphysics.'[21]  Mr. Mill himself reduces
external phenomena to 'possibilities of sensation.'  Kant, as we have
seen, made time and space 'forms' of our own intuitions.  Fichte,
having first by the inexorable logic of his understanding proved
himself to be a mere link in that chain of eternal causation which
holds so rigidly in Nature, violently broke the chain by making
Nature, and all that it inherits, an apparition of his own mind.[22]
And it is by no means easy to combat such notions.  For when I say I
see you, and that I have not the least doubt about it, the reply is,
that what I am really conscious of is an affection of my own retina.
And if I urge that I can check my sight of you by touching you, the
retort would be that I am equally transgressing the limits of fact;
for what I am really conscious of is, not that you are there, but
that the nerves of my hand have undergone a change.  All we hear, and
see, and touch, and taste, and smell, are, it would be urged, mere
variations of our own condition, beyond which, even to the extent of
a hair's breadth, we cannot go.  That anything answering to our
impressions exists outside of ourselves is not a _fact_, but an
_inference_, to which all validity would be denied by an idealist
like Berkeley, or by a sceptic like Hume.  Mr. Spencer takes another
line.  With him, as with the uneducated man, there is no doubt or
question as to the existence of an external world.  But he differs
from the uneducated, who think that the world really is what
consciousness represents it to be.  Our states of consciousness are
mere _symbols_ of an outside entity which produces them and
determines the order of their succession, but the real nature of
which we can never know.[23]  In fact, the whole process of evolution
is the manifestation of a Power absolutely inscrutable to the
intellect of man.  As little in our day as in the days of Job can man
by searching find this Power out.  Considered fundamentally, then, it
is by the operation of an insoluble mystery that life on earth is
evolved, species differentiated, and mind unfolded from their
prepotent elements in the immeasurable past.  There is, you will
observe, no very rank materialism here.

The strength of the doctrine of evolution consists, not in an
experimental demonstration (for the subject is hardly accessible to
this mode of proof), but in its general harmony with scientific
thought.  From contrast, moreover, it derives enormous relative
strength.  On the one side we have a theory (if it could with any
propriety be so called) derived, as were the theories referred to at
the beginning of this Address, not from the study of Nature, but from
the observation of men--a theory which converts the Power whose
garment is seen in the visible universe into an Artificer, fashioned
after the human model, and acting by broken efforts, as man is seen
to act.  On the other side, 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 is offered to the investigation of man.  And even this
span is only knowable in part.  We can trace the development of a
nervous system, and correlate with it the parallel phenomena of
sensation and thought.  We see with undoubting certainty that they go
hand in hand.  But we try to soar in a vacuum the moment we seek to
comprehend the connexion between them.  An Archimedean fulcrum is
here required which the human mind cannot command; and the effort to
solve the problem, to borrow a comparison from an illustrious friend
of mine, is like the effort of a man trying to lift himself by his
own waistband.  All that has been here said is to be taken in
connexion with this fundamental truth.  When 'nascent senses' are
spoken of, when 'the differentiation of a tissue at first vaguely
sensitive all over' is spoken of, and when these processes are
associated with 'the modification of an organism by its environment,'
the same parallelism, without contact, or even approach to contact,
is implied.  Man the _object_ is separated by an impassable gulf from
man the _subject_.  There is no motor energy in intellect to carry it
without logical rupture from the one to the other.

Further, the doctrine of evolution derives man in his totality from
the inter-action of organism and environment through countless ages
past.  The Human Understanding, for example--that faculty which Mr.
Spencer has turned so skilfully round upon its own antecedents--is
itself a result of the play between organism and environment through
cosmic ranges of time.  Never surely did prescription plead so
irresistible a claim.  But then it comes to pass that, over and above
his understanding, there are many other things appertaining to man
whose perspective rights are quite as strong as those of the
understanding itself.  It is a result, for example, of the play of
organism and environment that sugar is sweet and that aloes are
bitter, that the smell of henbane differs from the perfume of a rose.
Such facts of consciousness (for which, by the way, no adequate
reason has yet been rendered) are quite as old as the understanding;
and many other things can boast an equally ancient origin.  Mr.
Spencer at one place refers to that most powerful of passions--the
amatory passion--as one which, when it first occurs, is antecedent to
all relative experience whatever; and we may pass its claim as being
at least as ancient and valid as that of the understanding.  Then
there are such things woven into the texture of man as the feeling of
Awe, Reverence, Wonder--and not alone the sexual love just referred
to, but the love of the beautiful, physical, and moral, in Nature,
Poetry, and Art.  There is also that deep-set feeling which, since
the earliest dawn of history, and probably for ages prior to all
history, incorporated itself in the Religions of the world.  You who
have escaped from these religions into the high-and-dry light of the
intellect may deride them; but in so doing you deride accidents of
form merely, and fail to touch the immovable basis of the religious
sentiment in the nature of man.  To yield this sentiment reasonable
satisfaction is the problem of problems at the present hour.  And
grotesque in relation to scientific culture as many of the religions
of the world have been and are--dangerous, nay destructive, to the
dearest privileges of free-men as some of them undoubtedly have been,
and would, if they could, be again--it will be wise to recognize them
as the forms of a force, mischievous, if permitted to intrude on the
region of knowledge, over which it holds no command, but capable of
being guided to noble issues in the region of emotion, which is its
proper and elevated sphere.

All religious theories, schemes and systems, which embrace notions of
cosmogony, or which otherwise reach into the domain of science, must,
_in so far as they do this_, submit to the control of science, and
relinquish all thought of controlling it.  Acting otherwise proved
disastrous in the past, and it is simply fatuous to-day.  Every
system which would escape the fate of an organism too rigid to adjust
itself to its environment must be plastic to the extent that the
growth of knowledge demands.  When this truth has been thoroughly
taken in, rigidity will be relaxed, exclusiveness diminished, things
now deemed essential will be dropped, and elements now rejected will
be assimilated.  The lifting of the life is the essential point; and
as long as dogmatism, fanaticism, and intolerance are kept out,
various modes of leverage may be employed to raise life to a higher
level.  Science itself not unfrequently derives motive power from an
ultra-scientific source.  Whewell speaks of enthusiasm of temper as a
hindrance to science; but he means the enthusiasm of weak heads.
There is a strong and resolute enthusiasm in which science finds an
ally; and it is to the lowering of this fire, rather than to the
diminution of intellectual insight, that the lessening productiveness
of men of science in their mature years is to be ascribed.  Mr.
Buckle sought to detach intellectual achievement from moral force.
He gravely erred; for without moral force to whip it into action, the
achievements of the intellect would be poor indeed.

It has been said that science divorces itself from literature; but
the statement, like so many others, arises from lack of knowledge.  A
glance at the less technical writings of its leaders--of its
Helmholtz, its Huxley, and its Du Bois-Reymond--would show what
breadth of literary culture they command.  Where among modern writers
can you find their superiors in clearness and vigour of literary
style?  Science desires not isolation, but freely combines with every
effort towards the bettering of man's estate.  Single-handed, and
supported not by outward sympathy, but by inward force, it has built
at least one great wing of the many-mansioned home which man in his
totality demands.  And if rough walls and protruding rafter-ends
indicate that on one side the edifice is still incomplete, it is only
by wise combination of the parts required with those already
irrevocably built that we can hope for completeness.  There is no
necessary incongruity between what has been accomplished and what
remains to be done.  The moral glow of Socrates, which we all feel by
ignition, has in it nothing incompatible with the physics of
Anaxagoras which he so much scorned, but which he would hardly scorn
to-day.

And here I am reminded of one amongst us, hoary, but still strong,
whose prophet-voice some thirty years ago, far more than any other of
this age, unlocked whatever of life and nobleness lay latent in its
most gifted minds--one fit to stand beside Socrates or the Maccabean
Eleazar, and to dare and suffer all that they suffered and
dared--fit, as he once said of Fichte, 'to have been the teacher of
the Stoa, and to have discoursed of Beauty and Virtue in the groves
of Academe.'  With a capacity to grasp physical principles which his
friend Goethe did not possess, and which even total lack of exercise
has not been able to reduce to atrophy, it is the world's loss that
he, in the vigour of his years, did not open his mind and sympathies
to science, and make its conclusions a portion of his message to
mankind.  Marvellously endowed as he was--equally equipped on the
side of the Heart and of the Understanding--he might have done much
towards teaching us how to reconcile the claims of both, and to
enable them in coming times to dwell together in unity of spirit and
in the bond of peace.

And now the end is come.  With more time, or greater strength and
knowledge, what has been here said might have been better said, while
worthy matters here omitted might have received fit expression.  But
there would have been no material deviation from the views set forth.
As regards myself, they are not the growth of a day; and as regards
you, I thought you ought to know the environment which, with or
without your consent, is rapidly surrounding you, and in relation to
which some adjustment on your part may be necessary.  A hint of
Hamlet's, however, teaches us all how the troubles of common life may
be ended; and it is perfectly possible for you and me to purchase
intellectual peace at the price of intellectual death.  The world is
not without refuges of this description; nor is it wanting in persons
who seek their shelter and try to persuade others to do the same.
The unstable and the weak will yield to this persuasion, and they to
whom repose is sweeter than the truth.  But I would exhort you to
refuse the offered shelter and to scorn the base repose--to accept,
if the choice be forced upon you, commotion before stagnation, the
leap of the torrent before the stillness of the swamp.

In the course of this Address I have touched on debatable questions
and led you over what will be deemed dangerous ground--and this
partly with the view of telling you that as regards these questions
science claims unrestricted right of search.  It is not to the point
to say that the views of Lucretius and Bruno, of Darwin and Spencer,
may be wrong.  Here I should agree with you, deeming it indeed
certain that these views will undergo modification.  But the point
is, that, whether right or wrong, we ask the freedom to discuss them.
For science, however, no exclusive claim is here made; you are not
urged to erect it into an idol.  The inexorable advance of man's
understanding in the path of knowledge, and those unquenchable claims
of his moral and emotional nature which the understanding can never
satisfy, are here equally set forth.  The world embraces not only a
Newton, but a Shakespeare--not only a Boyle, but a Raphael--not only
a Kant, but a Beethoven--not only a Darwin, but a Carlyle.  Not in
each of these, but in all, is human nature whole.  They are not
opposed, but supplementary--not mutually exclusive, but reconcilable.
And if, unsatisfied with them all, the human mind, with the yearning
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 conception is here unattainable,
and that each succeeding age must be held free to fashion the Mystery
in accordance with its own needs--then, casting aside 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.

'Fill thy heart with it,' said Goethe, 'and then name it as thou
wilt.'  Goethe himself did this in untranslateable language.[24]
Wordsworth did it in words known to all Englishmen, and which may be
regarded as a forecast and religious vitalization of the latest and
deepest scientific truth,--

                    'For I have learned
  To look on nature; not as in the hour
  Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
  The still, sad music of humanity,
  Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
  To chasten and subdue.  _And I have felt
  A presence that disturbs me with the joy
  Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
  Of something far more deeply interfused,
  Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
  And the round ocean, and the living air,
  And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
  A motion and a spirit, that impels
  All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
  And rolls through all things_.'[25]




[1] Hume, _Natural History of Religion_.

[2] Born 460 B.C.

[3] Lange, 2nd edit., p. 23.

[4] Born 342 B.C.

[5] Tennyson's Lucretius.

[6] Born 99 B.C.

[7] Monro's translation.  In his criticism of this work,
_Contemporary Review_, 1867, Dr. Hayman does not appear to be aware
of the really sound and subtile observations on which the reasoning
of Lucretius, though erroneous, sometimes rests.

[8] _History of the Intellectual Development of Europe_, p. 295.

[9] _History of the Inductive Sciences_, vol. i.

[10] Depicted with terrible vividness in _Renan's Antichrist_.

[11] _Intellectual Development of Europe_, p. 359.

[12] Lange, 2nd edit. pp. 181, 182.

[13] See Huxley's admirable Essay on Descartes.  _Lay Sermons_, pp.
864, 365.

[14] Boyle's model of the universe was the Strasburg clock with an
outside Artificer.  Goethe, on the other hand, sang

  'Ihm ziemt's die Welt im Innern zu bewegen,
  Natur in sich, sich in Natur zu hegen.'

See also Carlyle, _Past and Present_, Chap. V.

[15] Only to some; for there are dignitaries who even now speak of
the earth's rocky crust as so much building material prepared for man
at the Creation.  Surely it is time that this loose language should
cease.

[16] _Zoonomia_, vol. i. pp. 500-510.

[17] In 1855 Mr. Herbert Spencer (Principles of Psychology, 2nd edit.
vol. i. p. 465) expressed 'the belief that life under all its forms
has arisen by an unbroken evolution, and through the instrumentality
of what are called natural causes.'

[18] The behaviour of Mr. Wallace in relation to this subject has
been dignified in the highest desgree.

[19] The first step only towards experimental demonstration has been
taken.  Experiments now begun might, a couple of centuries hence,
furnish data of incalculable value, which ought to be supplied to the
science of the future.

[20] Bruno was a 'Pantheist,' not an 'Atheist' or a 'Materialist.'

[21] _Examination of Hamilton_, p. 154.

[22] _Bestimmung des Menschen_.

[23] In a paper, at once popular and profound, entitled _Recent
Progress in the Theory of Vision_, contained in the volume of
Lectures by Helmholtz, published by Longmans, this symbolism of our
states of consciousness is also dwelt upon.  The impressions of sense
are the mere signs of external things.  In this paper Helmholtz
contends strongly against the view that the consciousness of space is
inborn; and he evidently doubts the power of the chick to pick up
grains of corn without preliminary lessons.  On this point, he says,
further experiments are needed.  Such experiments have been since
made by Mr. Spalding, aided, I believe, in some of his observations
by the accomplished and deeply lamented Lady Amberly; and they seem
to prove conclusively that the chick does not need a single moment's
tuition to enable it to stand, run, govern the muscles of its eyes,
and to peck.  Helmholtz, however, is contending against the notion of
pre-established harmony; and I am not aware of his views as to the
organisation of experiences of race or breed.

[24] Proœmium to 'Gott und Welt.'

[25] Tintern Abbey.



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