does, from fatalism, materialism, hylozoism, and from that definition of matter which Tyndall adopts. He affirms a very broad and sometimes startling doctrine of unconscious cerebration, but finds in the properties of the nervous mechanism no explanation whatever of our consciousness, that, by acts of will, we can originate physical movements, and control the direction of courses of thought. The central part of Tyndall's errors is to be found in his shy treatment of this necessary belief. There results from this shyness his insufficiently clear idea of what he means by causation. Almost while Tyndall was speaking before the British Association at Belfast on atoms, M. Wurtz, president of the French Association, was discussing before that body the same theme, and closing an opening address with no unscientific indistinctness as to what cause signifies. "It is in vain," he said, "that science has revealed to it the structure of the world and the order of all the phenomena: it wishes to mount higher; and in the conviction that things have not in themselves their own raison d'être, their support and their origin, it is led to subject them to a first cause, — unique and universal God" (Address republished in "Nature," Aug. 27, 1874). So much does Tyndall's Address lean on Professor Draper's book on "The Intellectual Development of Europe," that it is a witticism of the London press, that the discourse is rather vapory when stripped of its drapery; but Draper himself, in an elaborate chapter of his "Human Physiology" (pp. 283-290), undertakes, by an argument on the absolute inertness of nerve arcs and cells in themselves considered, to demonstrate physiologically the existence, independence, immateriality, and immortality of the soul. 7. The established definition is supported, and Tyndall's is not, by the intuitive belief of the mind. as to personal identity. All the particles of the body are changed within seven years, as science used to teach, or within one year, as it now teaches; and, trite as the power of this objection to materialism has made the objection itself, the inquiry is now more pertinent than ever; How is it thinkable, if matter evolves the personality, that this remains the same, while the physical man does not retain its identity during any two circuits of the seasons? Mysterious, indeed, is the phenomenon of the persistence of physical scars in living flesh that is constantly changing its composition. But grant that the physical basis of memory is an infinite number of infinitesimally small brain-scars, constantly reproduced, although the particles of the brain are all changed, still it is as unthinkable that these scars should rebuild themselves as that the original cuts should cut themselves. It is the generally-accepted theory of metaphysical science, that the soul builds. the body, and not the body the soul. But if it be assumed that matter does evolve spirit, then, in the case of the physical basis of memory, it must be supposed to be hand, chisel, inscription, and marble all at once, and not only so, but the reader of the inscription; and all this while every particle of the marble is known to crumble away, and to be replaced by entirely new particles, every twelve months. Flatter contradiction to that principle of the inductive method which asserts that every change must have an adequate cause does not exist anywhere than inheres in all attempts hitherto made to evolve from matter the soul's ineradicable conviction of personal identity. According to Tyndall's proposed definition, there is in man, as in the universe, but one substance: in the microcosmus, as in the macrocosmus, all is doublefaced matter, spiritual on the one side, and physical on the other. There is nowhere any immaterial agent separate from a material substance. The particles - of man's body are endowed with physical and spiritual properties, and are so peculiarly grouped, that their interaction produces not only his organization, but his inmost spiritual nature. To say, however, that although the body in its living state loses all its particles, and although these are replaced by new, the old form is yet retained, and that this similar grouping of the particles explains the continuity of the consciousness implied in the sense of personal identity, is to introduce design without a designer. Collocation of parts in an organism is precisely what materialism has never yet explained. Undoubtedly oxygen and hydrogen have such properties, that, if four atoms of the former and eight of the latter come into proper collocation with each other, they will unite, and form water; but they have no properties tending to bring them together in precisely these proportions. Collocation has ever been a word of evil omen to the materialistic theory. The particles that go out of the system do not transmit their spiritual any more than their physical qualities to the new particles that come in; for the spiritual qualities, as the changed definition of matter states, inhere in the very substance of each particle; and inherent properties are not transferable. When, therefore, we exhale and perspire wasted particles, there is plainly no room left by this definition for denying that we perspire latent soul, and exhale latent personality. In a complete renewal of the particles of the organization, therefore, there ought to be a renewal of the personality. Such is the theory; but right athwart the only course it can sail in juts up the gnarled rock of man's necessary belief that he does not change his personality: a reef, this, with its roots in the core of the world; a huge, hungry sea-crag, strewn already with the wrecks of multitudes of materialistic fleets, and where the new materialistic Armada is itself destined to beach on chaos. 8. The established definition is justified; and Tyndall's is not by the notorious failure of science to produce a single instance of spontaneous generation. 9. Admissions of the opponents of the established definition exist in abundance to prove, that, if taken 1 connection with the hypothesis of a creative personal First Cause, it explains all the facts which physical science presents; but these same opponents admit that their definition, even when the doctrine of evolution is accepted, brings the physical inquirer at the end of every possible path of investigation always face to face with insoluble mystery. 10. Finally, the mystic and transcendental definition, by making matter a double somewhat, possessed on its physical side of the qualities claimed for it by established science, but on its spiritual side of the properties necessary to evolve organization and life, attributes to matter self-contradictory qualities, and is itself inherently self-contradictory. Matter has extension, impenetrability, figure, divisibility, inertia, color. Mind has neither. Not one of these terms has any conceivable meaning in application to thought or emotion. What is the shape of love? How many inches long is fear? What is the color of memory? Since Aristotle and St. Augustine, the antithesis between mind and matter has been held to be so broad, that Sir William Hamilton's common measure for it was the phrase, the whole diameter of being." But it is proposed now and this is the chief thing I have to .say—to adopt a definition of matter which shall make extension and its absence, inertia and its absence, impenetrability and its absence, divisibility and its absence, form and its absence, color and its absence, co-inhere in the same substratum. To this monstrous self-contradiction the mystic hylozoism of Bain, Huxley, and Tyndall, inevitably leads when it defines matter as a double-faced unity, physical on the one side, and spiritual on the other. The reply |