John Tyndall

“ What we should oppose, to the death if necessary, is every attempt to found upon this elemental bias of man's nature a system which should exercise despotic sway over his intellect. I do not fear any such consummation. Science has already, to some extent, leavened the world, and it will leaven it more and more. I should look upon the mild light of science breaking in upon the minds of the youth of Ireland, and strengthening gradually to the perfect day, as a surer check to any intellectual or spiritual tyranny which might threaten this island than the laws of princes or the swords of emperors. ”

“ But when we endeavor to pass by a similar process from the phenomena of physics to those of thought, we meet a problem which transcends any conceivable expansion of the powers which we now possess. We may think over the subject again and again, but it eludes all intellectual presentation. The territory of physics is wide, but it has its limits from which we look with vacant gaze into the region beyond. Let us follow matter to its utmost bounds, let us claim it in all its forms—even in the muscles, blood, and brain of man himself, it is ours to experiment with and to speculate upon. ”

“ No atheistic reasoning can, I hold, dislodge religion from the heart of man. Logic cannot deprive us of life, and religion is life to the religious. As an experience of consciousness, it is perfectly beyond the assaults of logic. But the religious life is often projected in external forms—I use the word in its widest sense—by no means beyond the reach of logic, which will have to bear—and to do so more and more as the world becomes more enlightened—comparison with facts. The subjective energy to which I have just referred is also a fact of consciousness not to be reasoned away. ”

“ What baffles me, what I find unimaginable, transcending every faculty I possess—transcending, I humbly submit, every faculty you possess—is the notion that out of those physical tremors you can extract things so utterly incongruous with them as sensation, thought, and emotion. You may say, or think, that this issue of consciousness from the clash of atoms is not more incongruous than the flash of light from the union of oxygen and hydrogen. ”

“ We have been scourged by invisible thongs, attacked from impenetrable ambuscades, and it is only to-day that the light of science is being let in upon the murderous dominion of our foes. Men of Glasgow, these facts excite in me the thought that the rule and governance of this universe are different from what we in our youth supposed them to be—that the inscrutable Power, at once terrible and beneficent, in whom we live and move and have our being and our end, is to be propitiated by means different from those usually resorted to. ”

“ Two kinds of motion are here obviously active, a motion of translation, and a motion of undulation—the race of the river through its gorge, and the great waves generated by its collision with, and rebound from, the obstacles in its way. In the middle of the river the rush and tossing are most violent; at all events, the impetuous force of the individual waves is here most strikingly displayed. Vast pyramidal heaps leap incessantly from the river, some of them with such energy as to jerk their summits into the air, where they hang suspended as bundles of liquid spherules. ”

“ Many years ago I found myself in discussion with a friend who entertained the notion that the general tendency of things in this world is toward an equilibrium of peace and blessedness to the human race. My notion was, that equilibrium meant not peace and blessedness, but death. No motive power is to be got from heat, save during its fall from a higher to a lower temperature, as no power is to be got from water save during its descent from a higher to a lower level. Thus also life consists, not in equilibrium but in the passage toward equilibrium. ”

“ The seekers after natural knowledge had forsaken that fountain of living waters, the direct appeal to Nature by observation and experiment, and had given themselves up to the remanipulation of the notions of their predecessors. It was a time when thought had become abject, and when the acceptance of mere authority led, as it always does in science, to intellectual death. Natural events, instead of being traced to physical, were referred to moral causes, while an exercise of the fantasy, almost as degrading as the spiritualism of the present day, took the place of scientific speculation. ”

“ It is man's feelings, and not external phenomena, that are influenced by the assumption. It adds not a ray of light nor a strain of music to the objective sum of things. It does not touch the phenomena of physical Nature—storm, flood, or fire—nor diminish by a pang the bloody combats of the animal world. But it does add the glow of religious emotion to the human
soul, as represented by Mr. Martineau. Beyond this I defy him to go; and yet he rashly—it might be said petulantly—kicks away the only philosophic-foundation on which it is possible for him to build his religion. ”

“ What we call the heat of a gas is made up of these two motions—the flight of the molecules through space, and the quivering of their constituent atoms. Thus does the eye of Science pierce to what Newton called "the more secret and noble works of Nature," and make us at home amid the mysteries of a world lying in all probability vastly farther beyond the range of the microscope than the power of the microscope, at its maximum, lies beyond that of the unaided eye. ”

“ But, without verification, a theoretic conception is a mere figment of the intellect, and I am sorry to find us parting company at this point. The region of theory, both in science and theology, lies behind the world of the senses, but the verification of theory occurs in the sensible world. To check the theory we have simply to compare the deductions from it with the facts of observation. If the deductions be in accordance with the facts, we accept the theory: if in opposition, the theory is given up. A single experiment is frequently devised by which the theory must stand or fall. ”

“ The rain at length reached us; falling heavily all the way between us and the Foreland. But the sound, instead of being deadened, rose perceptibly in power. Hail was now added to the rain, and the shower reached a tropical violence, the hailstones floating thickly on the flooded deck. In the midst of this furious squall both the horns and the siren were distinctly heard; and as the shower lightened, thus lessening the local pattering, the sounds so rose in power that we heard them at a distance of 71⁄2 miles distinctly louder than they had been heard through the rainless atmosphere of 5 miles. ”

“ Ladies and gentlemen, there is a title which I believe, as the generations pass, will, if the owners of the title are true to themselves, become more and more a title of honor—that is, the title of a man of science—and of that title I should be utterly unworthy were I not prepared to trample all influences and motives such as those mentioned under foot, and were I not ready, did I conceive myself to be in error in what was brought before you last year, to avow here frankly and fully in your presence that error. ”

“ Struck with the problem of the generation and maintenance of organisms, and duly pondering it, he came to the conclusion that Nature in her productions does not imitate the technic of man. Her process is one of unraveling and unfolding. The infinity of forms under which matter appears was not imposed upon it by an external artificer; by its own intrinsic force and virtue it brings these forms forth. Matter is not the mere naked, empty capacity which philosophers have pictured her to be, but the universal mother, who brings forth all things as the fruit of her own womb. ”

“ Possibly Mr, Martineau may consider the assumption of this soul to be as untenable and as useless as I do. But, then, if the power to build a tree be conceded to pure matter, what an amazing expansion of our notions of the "potency of matter" is implied in the concession! Think of the acorn, of the earth, and of the solar light and heat—was ever such necromancy dreamed of as the production of that massive trunk, those swaying boughs and whispering leaves, from the interaction of these three factors? In this interaction, moreover, consists what we call life. ”

“ Such a case occurred toward the close of my visit to Niagara. There had been rain and storm in the upper-lake regions, and the quantity of suspended matter brought down quite extinguished the fascinating green of the Horseshoe.
Nothing can be more superb than the green of the Atlantic waves when the circumstances are favorable to the exhibition of the color. As long as a wave remains unbroken, no color appears, but, when the foam just doubles over the crest like an Alpine snow-cornice, under the cornice we often see a display of the most exquisite green. It is metallic in its brilliancy. ”

“ Hence I say, if, abandoning your illegitimate claim to knowledge, you place, with Job, your forehead in the dust and acknowledge the authorship of this universe to be past finding out—if, having made this confession, and relinquished the views of the mechanical theologian, you desire, for the satisfaction of feelings which I admit to be in great part those of humanity at large, to give ideal form to the Power that moves all things—it is not by me that you will find objections raised to this exercise of ideality, when consciously and worthily carried out. ”

“ While refreshing my mind on these old themes I am struck by the poverty of my own thought; appearing to myself as a person possessing one idea, which so overmasters him that he is never weary of repeating it. That idea is the polar conception of the grandeur and the littleness of man—the vastness of his range in some respects and directions, and his powerlessness to take a single step in others. ”

“ An opinion is expressed, a belief, a leaning—not an established "doctrine," The burden of my writings in this connection is as much a recognition of the weakness of science as an assertion of its strength. In 1867 I told the working-men of Dundee that while making the largest demand for freedom of investigation; while considering science to be alike powerful as an instrument of intellectual culture, and as a ministrant to the material wants of men—if asked whether science has solved, or is likely in our day to solve, "the problem of the universe," I must shake my head in doubt. ”

“ But when, manipulated by the constructive imagination, mixed with imperfect or inaccurate historic data, and moulded by misapplied logic, this feeling traverses our knowledge of Nature, Science, as in duty bound, stands as a hostile power in its path. It is against the mythologic scenery, if I may use the term, rather than against the life and substance of religion, that Science enters her protest. Sooner or later among thinking people, that scenery will be taken for what it is worth—as an effort on the part of man to bring the mystery of life and Nature within the range of his capacities ”

“ Is it not possible to make human life the copy of a divine pattern? The question could only have occurred in the first instance to the more exalted minds. But, instead of working upon the inner forces and convictions of men, legislation presented itself as a speedier way to the attainment of the desired end. To legislation, therefore, the Puritans resorted. Instead of guiding, they repressed, and thus pitted themselves against the unconquerable impulses of human nature. Believing that nature to be depraved, they felt themselves logically warranted in putting it in irons. ”

“ Sure the time must come at last when human nature in its entirety, whose legitimate demands it is admitted science alone cannot satisfy, will find interpreters and expositors of a different stamp from those rash and ill-informed persons who have been hitherto so ready to hurl themselves against every new scientific revelation, lest it should endanger what they are pleased to consider theirs.
The lode of discovery once struck, those petrified forms in which life was at one time active increased to multitudes and demanded classification. ”

“ Accepting that theory as probable, is it not permitted to a scientific man to follow up in idea the series of changes associated with the condensation of the nebulæ; to picture the successive detachment of planets and moons, and the relation of all of them to the sun? If I look upon our earth, with its orbital revolution and axial rotation, as one small issue of the process which made the solar system what it is, will any theologian deny my right to entertain and express this theoretic view? ”

“ But then it comes to pass that, over and above his understanding, there are many other things appertaining to man whose prescriptive rights are quite as strong as that of the understanding itself. It is a result, for example, of the play of organism and environment that sugar is sweet and that aloes are bitter, that the smell of henbane differs from the perfume of a rose. Such facts of consciousness (for which, by-the-way, no adequate reason has ever yet been rendered) are quite as old as the understanding itself, and many other things can boast an equally ancient origin. ”

“ The writer is not a whit behind his colleagues in literary brilliancy and logical force. But, having no touchstone in his own experience to enable him to distinguish a good experiment from a bad one, he has committed, on the point of the gravest practical import, the influence of the powerful journal in which he writes to the support of error. It is only, I would repeat, by practice among facts that the intellect is prepared to judge of facts, and no mere logical acuteness or literary skill can atone for the want of this necessary education. ”

“ To the picture of Catholic students seceding to Trinity and the Queen's Colleges, the memorialists add this darkest stroke of all: "They will, in the solitude of their own homes, unaided by any guiding advice, devour the works of Häckel, Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, and Lyell; works innocuous if studied under a professor who would point out the difference between established facts and erroneous inferences, but which are calculated to sap the faith of a solitary student, deprived of a discriminating judgment to which he could refer for a solution of his difficulties." ”