ARTICLE II.-THE BELFAST ADDRESS IN ANOTHER

LIGHT.

What shadows of knowledge deceive the world, and in what useless dreams the greatest part of men, yea, learned men, do spend their days; much of that which some men unweariedly study, and take to be the honor of their understandings and their lives, being a mere game of words and useless notions, and as truly to be called vanity and vexation as is the rest of the vain show that most men walk in.-BAXTER.

The army of liberal thought is at present in very loose order; and many a spirited free-thinker makes use of his liberty mainly to vent nonsense. We should be the better for a vigorous and watchful enemy to hammer us into cohesion and discipline, and I for one lament that the bench of bishops cannot show a man of the calibre of Butler of the Analogy, who if he were still alive, would make short work of much of the current a priori infidelity.-HUXLEY.

The philosophy of Mr. Herbert Spencer has been much praised, but little understood, as was lately shown by the surprise and misunderstanding that greeted Mr. Tyndall, when in his Belfast address he gave to it the weight of his own authority.-The Nation, in review of " Cosmic Philosophy."

We each enunciated not new views, but views to which modern science most unmistakably points.-Prof. PROCTOR, in Boston, referring to his own lecture in New York, April, 1873, and the Belfast address of Prof. Tyndall.

New York Tribune Extra, No. 23. Prof. Tyndall's Address at Belfast.

Address delivered before the British Association assembled at Belfast, by John Tyndall, F.R.S. Revised by the author, with a second preface replying to his critics, and an appended article on Scientific Materialism.-D. Appleton & Company, New York.

IN the preface to the new edition of Fragments of Science, which is also a reply to Mr. Martineau's criticism of the Belfast address, Prof. Tyndall informs his readers that having spent the leisure of a summer in Switzerland in revising the papers included in the new volume, bestowing special attention upon the address, he now commits them to the judgment of thoughtful men; from which it may be fairly inferred that he regards this collection of papers as a mutually consistent and harmonious series of utterances in behalf of the system of thought with which his name has long been associated, each of which is in that light capable of being successfully defended

upon scientific grounds, and that he feels prepared so to defend them.

The system in question, founded upon the correlation of force, is known as The New Philosophy, and to it we are indebted for the nebular theory in its present form, as it is expounded in the philosophical system of Mr. Spencer-the hypothesis of molecular or natural evolution.

The peculiar interest lately taken in the system has grown out of the delivery of the Belfast address; and the question which we are about to consider with respect to it is as to the nature of the system, and the attitude towards it in which the address leaves Prof. Tyndall.

The question is an exceedingly simple one if we may judge from the confidence with which it has been attacked, but by no means so simple as might appear if we consider the small success which has been achieved in dealing with it. For however justly the intention of espousing Mr. Spencer's philosophy, may have been attributed to Prof. Tyndall, a really thoughtful scrutiny of the facts will show, that through a failure to take into account what Mr. Spencer's system really is, and what the Belfast address in fact says about it, there has resulted a most singular misapprehension of the whole matter-a misapprehension so serious and radical, as to have led to a conclusion quite at variance with the facts.

What the Belfast address assumes to do, is, to account for the origin of life; attributing it to the inherent powers of matter. If this solution of the mystery is a valid one, Prof. Tyndall has previously shown, that it is through the operation of molecular forces acting under the law of correlation; and this agrees with Mr. Spencer's doctrine of evolution. Accordingly, Prof. Tyndall says, in the preface to his address: "I hold the nebular theory as it was held by Kant, La Place, and William Herschel."

Prof. Proctor also says, to the same effect, of the views announced by himself in New York, and by Prof. Tyndall at Belfast: "We both enunciated not new views but views to which modern science most unmistakably points." An assertion that both he and Tyndall have abandoned the current belief in creation to adopt the views of those men of science

who, founding their system upon the supreme potency of molecular force and correlation, and assuming to derive the phenomena of spirit from those of matter, deny creation to assert evolution. They disdain the "carpenter theory" as too mechanical, and offer as the scientific substitute, a purely mechanical theory of the universe, including life and thought, and a correlation of all the phenomena of the universe with matter and motion.

That this is the real nature of their system, and that it is in fact founded upon correlation, is clear to any one who is familiar with the subject, from the nature of the case, since human thought has as yet failed to discover any middle ground between matter and spirit, and whatever function of causation we deny to one we necessarily assert for the other, and since correlation, embracing all the functions of matter as it must if it be true, and believed in as it is both by Prof. Tyndall and by all the advocates of the new philosophy, with whom he claims to agree, compels them if they believe in materialism, to draw it from this fundamental axiom of their system.

And they themselves take substantially the same view as appears when Mr. Spencer asserts that the ground-work of both science and philosophy is in the conservation of force. He says:

"The sole truth which transcends experience by underlying it is thus the persistence of force. To this an ultimate analysis brings us down, and on this a rational synthesis must be built up." First Principles, p. 192.

Again, Prof. Tyndall refers the first conception of evolution to a certain uniformity of law observed in nature,* concerning the grounds of which Mr. Spencer says:

"Thus, what we call the uniformity of law, resolvable as we find it into the persistence of relations among forces, is an immediate corollary from the persistence of force." First Principles, p. 195.

But it is needless to go into any lengthy discussion of the nature of evolution upon merely general grounds, it being more to the purpose to see how Prof. Tyndall himself regards it; while, if the discussion is confined to this particular point, the question will not be raised of imputing any views of others to him which he does not hold, and again, we shall leave with him the responsiblity of imputing his own views to them.

To the authorized American edition of the Belfast address there is appended an essay on scientific materialism from Fragments of Science, for the purpose as would seem of explaining more fully and decisively the exact position of Prof. Tyndall upon the subject than there was room to do in the address. The extraordinary manner in which the address is explained

by the essay will appear as we compare the one with the other.

The object of the essay is to expound a mechanical theory of life, a theory which maintains, not simply that the animal economy is a mechanism, like a clock, which can be made answerable to the uses of an intelligent spiritual being, but that every one of the vital processes is a natural as distinguished from a supernatural or spiritual phenomenon, and that they are all of them sufficiently accounted for by the operation of mechanical laws; and the argument begins with this definition of a natural phenomenon :

"Mathematics and physics have been long accustomed to coalesce; for no matter how subtle a natural phenomenon may be, whether we view it in the region of sense, or follow it into that of the imagination, it is in the long run reducible to mechanical laws." Fragments of Science, p. 110, or Belfast Address, p. 108.

And proceeding naturally from such a definition, he speaks of the building of a pyramid in which the blocks are placed in their positions by human agency, and afterwards of the forma tion of a crystal of salt as an example of an architecture of a different sort, the agency being molecular force; concluding thence that the grain of corn and the animal frame with all their wonders of constructive power and skill, are equally, with the crystal of salt, the work of unchangeable necessity and law; asserting that with a sufficient expansion of the faculties which we now possess, and the necessary molecular data, the chick might be deduced as rigorously and as logically from the egg as the existence of Neptune from the disturbances of Uranus, or as conical refraction from the undulatory theory of light. And he ends the argument by saying

"You see I am not mincing matters, but avowing nakedly what many scientific thinkers more or less distinctly believe. The formation of a crystal, a plant, or an animal, is in their eyes a purely mechanical problem, which differs from the problems of ordinary mechanics in the smallness of the masses and the complexity of the processes involved." Fragments of Science, p. 118, or Address, p. 116.

And in the argument the mechanical conception is held to distinguish the natural from the spiritual, as if the pyramid, which is confessedly a work of the human will, had been made without the agency of those mechanical laws which in the eyes of the materialist seem to displace volition, whereas we know if we reflect, that law is just as much indispensable to the artificial as to the natural phenomenon, and that force which is the materialistic synonym for law, must either be absent from the works of men, or fail to prove the absence of volition in the the works of Nature.

But again, the doctrine of the essay, which is like that of the address ascribed to many other scientific thinkers, is also avowed as Prof. Tyndall's own, and he stands committed in direct terms no less than by the necessities of his system, to the doctrine that the correlated molecular forces are the ground upon which the processes of life are asserted to be purely mechanical processes-instances of the spontaneous interplay of matter and force.

But in the essay next following this in Fragments of Science, "The Scientific Use of The Imagination," the same mechanical theory is made to account for the beginning as well as the continuance of life. This is a natural and quite legitimate development of the argument, which throws light upon what we shall presently find in another quarter. Having remarked upon the current belief in creation, he contrasts with it the alternative hypothesis of evolution involved in the nebular theory.

"But however the convictions of individuals here and there may be influenced, the process must be slow and secular which commends the rival hypothesis of natural evolution to the public mind. For what are the core and essence of this hypothesis? Strip it naked and you stand face to face with the notion, that not alone the more ignoble forms of animalcular and animal life, not alone the nobler forms of the horse and lion, not alone the exquisite and wonderful mechanism of the human body, but that the human mind itself, emotion, intellect, will, and all their phenomena were once latent in a fiery cloud. **** But the hypothesis would probably go even farther than this. Many who hold it would probably assent to the position, that at the present moment all our poetry, all our philosophy, all our science, and all our art, Plato, Shakespeare, Newton, and Raphael, are potential in the fires of the sun. ***** I do not think that any holder of the evolution hypothesis will say that I overstate it or overstrain it in any way. I simply bring before you unclothed and unvarnished the notions by which it must stand or fall." Fragments of Science, p. 159.