< Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu
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EDITOR'S TABLE.

evidence," and adequate to explain the physical origin of the universe; while Prof. Clerk Maxwell, according to Dr. McCosh, "discovers, in the very nature and properties of a molecule, a proof of design," thus making the atomic theory a help to religion by furnishing evidence of the existence of God.

It is a noteworthy circumstance, as showing the growth of a better state of mind, that the writers we are considering agree in abstaining from the charge of materialism, which has been so freely indulged in by others against Prof. Tyndall. They know that it cannot be maintained; but, while refraining from the imputation of "gross materialism," it is still implied that he must be some sort of a materialist. The writer in the Penn Monthly expressly acquits him of the charge as usually construed, by saying, "Prof. Tyndall is not a materialist of the school of De la Mettre and Holbach." He then puts the question, "In what sense, then, is Prof. Tyndall a materialist, if he be one at all?" and replies: "In the sense of being a naturalist;" and this term is again used in a vague and unusual sense. But it were better to have allowed Prof. Tyndall to explain his own position, which he has done in the most explicit manner. It is now generally understood, as the writer just quoted implies, that the term "materialism" is used with different significations, and Prof. Tyndall has qualified the form of it which he maintains as "scientific materialism." This consists simply in ascribing higher powers and possibilities to matter than hitherto, and not in sinking mind in matter, or in asserting the materiality of mind in the name of scientific authority. In an address, delivered before the mathematical and physical section of the British Association held in Norwich, in 1868,[1] Professor Tyndall took exactly the same ground that he assumed last August at Belfast; and passages from the discourse were widely quoted at the time as containing the most decisive disavowal and disproof of materialism in its usually accepted sense. Our reviewers should have reproduced the following portion; and, as they have not, we supply the omission:

"The relation of physics to consciousness being thus invariable, it follows that, given the state of the brain, the corresponding thought or feeling might be inferred; or, given the thought or feeling, the corresponding state of the brain might be inferred. But how inferred? It would be at bottom not a case of logical inference at all, but of empirical association. You may reply that many of the inferences of science are of this character; the inference, for example, that an electric current of a given direction will deflect a magnetic needle in a definite way; but the cases differ in this, that the passage from the current to the needle, if not demonstrable, is thinkable, and that we entertain no doubt as to the final mechanical solution of the problem. But the passage from the physics of the brain to the corresponding facts of consciousness is unthinkable. Granted that a definite thought, and a definite molecular action in the brain, occur simultaneously; we do not possess the intellectual organ, nor apparently any rudiment of the organ, which would enable us to pass, by a process of reasoning, from the one to the other. They appear together, but we do not know why. Were our minds and senses so expanded, strengthened, and illuminated, as to enable us to see and feel the very molecules of the brain; were we capable of following all their motions, all their groupings, all their electric discharges, if such there be; and were we intimately acquainted with the corresponding states of thought and feeling, we should be as far as ever from the solution of the problem, 'How are these physical processes connected with the facts of consciousness?' The chasm between the two classes of phenomena would still remain intellectually impassable. Let the consciousness of love, for example, be associated with a right-handed spiral motion of the molecules of the brain, and the consciousness of hate with a left-handed spiral motion. We should then know when we love that the motion is in one direction, and when we hate that the motion is in the other; but the 'why?' would remain as unanswerable as before.
"In affirming that the growth of the body
  1. ↑ This interesting discourse has been added as an Appendix to the last American edition of the Belfast Address.
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