nition of matter. Of the many forms of materialism, his coincides nearest with a tendency which has been gathering strength among physicists for the last hundred years, years, to deny that there are two substances in the universe, matter and mind, with opposite qualities, and to affirm that there is but one substance, matter, itself possessed of two sets of properties, or of a physical side and a spiritual side, making up a double-faced unity. (BAIN, PROFESSOR ALEXANDER, Mind and Body, 1873, pp. 130, 140, 191, 196.) This is precisely the materialism of Professor Bain of Aberdeen, and of Professor Huxley; and its numerous supporters in England, Scotland, and Germany, are fond of proclaiming that among metaphysicians, as well as among physiologists, it is the growing opinion; and that the arguments to prove the existence of two substances have now entirely lost their validity, and are no longer compatible with ascertained science and clear thinking.

Tyndall's speculations as to matter are simply an extension of the hypothesis of evolution, according to the scientific doctrine of uniformity, from the known to the unknown. Back to a primordial germ Darwin is supposed by Tyndall to have traced all organization: back to the properties of unorganized matter in a primordial nebula Tyndall now traces that germ. Evolution explains every thing since the germ. Evolution must be applied to explain as much as possible before the germ. So far as we can test her processes by observation and experiment, Nature is known to proceed by the method of evolution:

where we cannot test her processes, analogy requires that we should suppose that she proceeds by the same method. As all the organizations now or in past time on the earth were potentially in the primordial germ, so that germ was potentially in the unorganized particles of the primordial star-dust: in other words there was latent in matter from the first the power to evolve organization, thought, emotion, and will. Where matter obtained this power, or whether matter is selfexistent, physical science has no means of determining. In the evolution of the universe from a primordial haze of matter possessing both physical and spiritual properties, there has been no design other than that implied in the original constitution of the molecular particles. Of course, it is utterly futile to oppose these views as self-contradictory in the light of the established definition of matter.

Many of the replies made to Professor Tyndall, however, miss the central point in his scheme of thought and endeavor to show that it is madness to imagine that matter, as now and for centuries defined by science, can evolve organization and life. But no one has proclaimed the insanity of such a supposition more vigorously than Tyndall has himself. "These evolution notions," he exclaims, "are absurd, monstrous, and fit only for the intellectual gibbet, in relation to the ideas concerning matter. which were drilled into us when young" (Address on the Scientific Use of the Imagination, 1870). Most assuredly Professor Tyndall does not propose "to sweep up music with a broom," or "to produce

a poem by the explosion of a type foundery." Audacities of that sort are to be left to the La Mettries and Cabanis and Holbachs: they are not attempted even by the Büchners and Carl Vogts and Moleschotts and DuBois Reymonds, who, with some whom Tyndall too much resembles, are now obsolete or obsolescent in Germany. "If a man is a materialist," said Professor Tholuck to me once, as we walked up and down a celebrated long arbor in his garden at Halle," we Germans think he is not educated." In the history of speculation, so many forms of the materialistic theory have perished, that a chance of life for a new form can be found in nothing less fundamental than a change in the definition of matter. Tyndall perceives, as every one must who has any eye for the signs of the times in modern. research, that if Waterloos are to be fought between opposing schools of science, or between science and theology or philosophy, the majestic line of shock and onset must be this one definition. "Either let us open our doors freely to the conception of creative acts," he says in the sentence which best indicates his point of view in his Belfast Address, "or, abandoning them, let us radically change our notions of matter."

Now, it is singular, and yet not singular, that one can find now here in Tyndall's writings the changed definition on which every thing turns. The following four proposition, all stated in his own language, taken from different parts of his recent discussions, are the best approach to a definition that I have been

able to find in examining all he has ever published on materialism :

1. "Emotion, intellect, will, and all their phenomena, were once latent in a fiery cloud" (TYNDALL, Fragments of Science, Eng. ed., p. 163). "I discern in matter the promise and potency of every form and quality of life" (Belfast Address, 1874). "Who will set limits to the possible play of molecules in a cooling planet? Matter is essentially mystical and transcendental" (TYNDALL, Fragments of Science, Eng. ed., p. 163).

2. "Supposing that, in youth, we had been impregnated with the notion of the poet Goethe, instead of the notion of the poet Young, looking at matter not as brute matter, but as the living garment of God, is it not probable that our repugnance to the idea of primeval union between spirit and matter might be considerably abated?" (Fragments of Science, p. 165.)

us.

3.

"Granting the nebula and its potential life, the question, Whence come they? would still remain to baffle and bewilder The hypothesis does nothing more than transport the conception of life's origin to an indefinitely distant past" (Fragments of Science, p. 166).

4. "Philosophical defenders of the doctrine of uniformity .. have as little fellowship with the atheist, who says that there is no God, as with the theist, who professes to know the mind of God. Two things,' said Immanuel Kant, fill me with awe: the starry heavens, and the sense of moral responsibility in man.' . . . The scientific investigator finds himself overshadowed by the same awe" (Fragments of Science, p. 167). "I have noticed during years of self-observation that it is not in hours of clearness and vigor that the doctrine (of materialistic atheism) commends itself to my mind, and that, in the presence of stronger and healthier thought, it ever dissolves and disappears, as offering no solution of the mystery in which we dwell, and of which we form a part" (Additions to the Belfast Address, in TYNDALL'S authorized edition).

Of the definition of matter implied in these ex

tracts, it must be affirmed, not that it is new, for it is simply what the schools call hylozoism, modified by the recent forms of the atomic theory and of the doctrine of evolution, but that it reverses the best established position of science.

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

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

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

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

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

Of course, the logical existence of the alternatives implied in this argument is denied by those who attribute both inertia and spiritual properties to matter as a mystic, transcendental, double-faced unity; but, while they use the word "inertia," their definition of it is not the established one, as is that here employed. By force, I mean that which is expended in produ