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This "potency" of matter, then, when discerned at all, is discerned only "beyond the pale of experience," "across the boundary of experimental evidence." Scientifically, therefore, it is non-existent; a mere "intellectual figment," the product of an imaginary "intellectual necessity": an "unverified theoretic conception," nothing more; and this only when it has been actually "discerned." But, as simple matter of fact, it has never yet been. actually discerned. Professor Tyndall himself has not thus discerned it. What he here calls discernment he elsewhere calls the scientific use of the Imagination. It is he himself who warrants the affirmation that this alleged "potency of all terrestrial Life" has not been discerned in Matter at all; it has only been imagined. "Conscious life" is a part, and the principal part, of "all terrestrial life." Has the life of a fern or an oak this potential "consciousness"? It is Dr. Tyndall who answers, "No man can tell." Does pig iron possess this potency of conscious cogitation? or does the loftiest granite needle of the Alps cheer its eternal solitude with the reflection, "Cogito, ergo sum"? There

1

1 "Materialism and its Opponents," Fortnightly Review, vol. xviii. p. 595. "Fragments of Science," Introduction.

is no answer. They make no sign. No such promise or potency is exhibited, and it is therefore no wonder that it is not discerned. But alter the conditions of discernment, says Dr. Tyndall, and then "I can imagine not only the vegetable, but the mineral world, responsive to the proper irritants." Not, "I have discerned"; nor even I can discern; but only "I can imagine!"

2

And here the matter might be left, were it not that Dr. Tyndall has himself compelled us to ask whether he has not estimated too highly his own power of imagination. For how can even he imagine that which he himself tells us is unimaginable? The passage from physics to consciousness, he tells us, "is unthinkable." "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." Nor would the result be altered if even the experiment could be made under the altered conditions

1 "Materialism and its Opponents," Fortnightly Review, vol. xviii. p. 595. "Fragments of Science," Intro3"Belfast Address,” p. 33.

duction.

2 Ibid, p. 589.

which in the passage above cited, it was found necessary to hypothecate. "Alter the capacity" of the observer, it was then said, "and the evidence would alter too." 1 Yet here, only six pages earlier, in the very same paper, we are told: "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." 2

Yet notwithstanding all this, Dr. Tyndall formally proclaims his "belief" "in the continuity of Nature." The "continuity" of an "impassable chasm"! A chasm "intellectually impassable"; and yet "by an intellectual necessity" he crosses it. "Two classes of phenomena," and no possible means of transition

1 "Materialism and its Opponents," p. 595.

2 Ibid., p. 589.

from one to the other.

For, in order to "dis

cern in matter the promise" of conscious life, we must be able, by observation of its merely physical movements, to forecast, in a world as yet insentient, the future phenomena of thought and feeling. Yet this is precisely the transition which is pronounced "unthinkable." "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."1

It is an instructive spectacle. Professor Huxley "expecting" to witness, in the remote past, the performance of a feat which he sees "no reason for believing" has ever yet been performed; and Professor Tyndall, "by an intellectual necessity" and a "vision of the mind,” crossing "the chasm" "intellectually impassable" which separates two classes of phenomena, although he does "not possess the intellectual organ, nor apparently any rudiment of the organ, which would enable him to pass, by a process of reasoning, from the one to the other."

"Materialism and its Opponents," p. 589.

Horace was undoubtedly right :

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quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus.” 1

But had he lived in our time, and written of the Homers of modern materialism; had he heard their conjectural hypotheses, their conflicting asseverations, their autocratic dogmatism;

"Matter is the origin of all that exists; all natural and mental forces are inherent in it":2 "All the natural bodies with which we are acquainted are equally living: the distinction which has been held as existing between the living and the dead does not really exist:"3 "The eternal is the nothing of nature:" "There is no other science than that which treats of nothing" 4" Holothuria engender snails;"5 and "gazing upon a snail, one believes that he finds the prophesying goddess sitting upon the tripod;" for "a snail is an exalted symbol of mind, slumbering deeply within itself:"" while

1 "Ars Poet.," 359.

2 Buchner's" Kraft und Stoff." (Collingwood's Translation) p. 32.

3 "Naturliche Schöpfungsgeschichte." By Dr. Ernst Haeckel. Sixth Edition, p. 21.

4 "Physiophilosophy" of Prof. Oken.

5 Buchner's" Kraft und Stoff," p. 80.

6 Oken.

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