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PROFESSOR TYNDALL’S
INAUGURAL ADDRESS.
[From The Inquirer of September 5, 1874.]
HE Inaugural Address delivered at Belfast, on
August 19, by Professor Tyndall, President of
the British Association, has probably come like a
thunder-clap to thousands who have read it or heard
of it. For here is one of the strongest, one of the
most generally acknowledged, representatives of
science, the chief, indeed, of the highest scientific
society in the world, from the very throne of science
—the presidential chair—speaking what will seem to
multitudes no other, than the most undisguised
Materialism, which to them will also be the blankest
Atheism. For it will seem the burden of the Address,
that matter alone is the mother and cause of all things,
and that beside it there is no other cause. No God,
no human soul.
When so intelligent a journal as the Spectator thus
interprets the Address in the issue immediately after
its delivery, we may be sure that thousands of persons
will thus interpret it also. And this word of Tyndall,
coming from such a source, supported by such pres
tige and such authority, will make the hearts of many
quail and sicken with fear and sadness. They will
feel a great darkness falling on them. The same
doctrine they will no doubt have often heard before,
but not from such a quarter, with such distinctness,
and coming with such terrible weight. They have
T
�2
thought of it hitherto as the craze of individual and
eccentric scientists, but now it comes as the testimony
of the whole spirit of science, past and present,
spoken through the mouthpiece of one of her latest
and greatest sons. And the thought cannot but
whisper itself: “ Is it, then, really true, or, if not
true, is science going to be all-powerful and make it
seem true, and so make it ultimately prevail ? If so,
then hope and faith must fade. Religion will have
no place. Prayer and preaching will cease. All the
various creeds through which we believe and about
which we contend will equally vanish. Religious
societies will be dissolved, and the whole spirit of
our civilisation must be changed, so that it is terribleto think what the future ages may be.”
We cannot wonder that already the tocsin of alarm
has resounded from many a pulpit. We may be sure
that for months, perhaps years to come, there will be
heard from thousands of pulpits protests, arguments,
denunciations, pleadings, intended to lay the terrible
ghosts which this memorable Address has raised.
But what is it that Dr Tyndall has really said to
cause such sensation and such fear ? He has simply
said out boldly what science has been really saying,
though often with timid, hesitating speech, for many a
year, we may say for many an age. It is this : that
matter, as we become more and more acquainted with it,
shows itself to us as capable, by its own inherent laws
and forces, of developing into all the forms and causing
all the phenomena in the universe that we witness or
experience. And so with matter given to begin with,
existing it may be in its crudest form, but still with
all its inherent laws and forces, there is no need of
any other Being, any Creator, any God to mould it,
for it will infallibly mould itself. It is but the same
thought with a wider extension which Laplace
uttered : “ I ask no more than the laws of motion,
heat, and gravitation, and I will write you the
nativity and biography of the solar system.”
�3
Yet do not let us be alarmed through mistaking
the real force and bearing of this apparently most
materialistic affirmation. Observe at the outset the
expression, that matter being given with its inherent
laws and forces, no other creator is necessary to
mould it. Surely not, we, too, say, because the
Creator, the eternal former and sustainer, is in the
laws and forces : they are but the expression of his
action. It is not, then, against the idea of God
Himself that the hostility of science, as represented
by the President of the British Association, is
directed, but against a form of thought in which
men in general have clothed God and presented him
to their minds. They have thought of Him under
the image of a Great Artificer, one who, using matter
as his raw material, worked it up by his power and
skill into the forms which we behold. It is this
thought of an Almighty Artificer, separate from
matter, that science cannot tolerate. But the de
struction of this form of thought, instead of plunging
us into the darkness of Atheism, opens upon us the
light of true Theism. It leaves us free to form
another far grander and worthier thought of God,
that of the In-dwelling, all-forming, and all-sustaining
Spirit of the Universe, which it is clear that Dr Tyndall
recognises under what he calls a Cosmical life—that
is, a life of the Universe.
The truth is, that this conception of God as the
Great Artificer has been inadequate and erroneous
from the beginning. We can now see that it was an
idol, because not the highest conception that we can
form, though perhaps inevitable to the times of
ignorance at which God has winked. And science,
like a young Abraham, has sought from its very
youth to break the idol in pieces. This is why
science has seemed so Atheistic in its tendencies.
The legend of Abraham preserved in the Koran is,
that when he was a young man he went into one of
the temples of his people in their absence and broke
�in pieces all the idols except the biggest there.
Abraham’s hostile feeling towards the idols was
known. He was arrested and brought before the
Assembly. “ Hast thou done this unto our gods,
O Abraham ? ” they inquired. “Nay, that biggest
of them has done the deed : ask them, if they can
speak.” For a time the people were confounded
with his reply, but soon recovered to say to oneanother, “Burn him, and avenge your gods.” The
young Abraham, science, conceived from the first a
hostility to the idol of an artificer God set up in the
temple of man’s mind, and sought to destroy it.
Dr Tyndall’s Address is partly a history of these
endeavours of science to break in pieces the idol.
He tells how in the infancy of Greek science Demo
critus, the laughing philosopher, declared his uncom
promising antagonism to those who deduced the
phenomena of nature from the gods. Empedocles,
who probably met death in his zeal for science in the
burning crater of Etna, and then Epicurus, followed
in the footsteps of Democritus. In the century
before Christ the Roman poet Lucretius boldly
announced the doctrine that Nature was sufficient for
herself. “If,” said he, “you will apprehend and
keep in mind these things, Nature, free at once and
rid of her high lords (the gods and demons), is seen
to do all things spontaneously of herself without the
meddling of the gods.” Whilst science slept, during
the Middle Ages, the voice of protest was not heard;
but when she awoke again, in the era of the Refor
mation, Giordano Bruno, once an Italian monk, again
raised the old witness, and declared that the infinity
of forms under which matter appears were not
imposed upon it by an external artificer. “ By its
own intrinsic force and virtue f he said, “ it brings
these forms forth. Matter is not the mere naked,
empty capacity which philosophers have pictured it,
but the universal mother who brings forth all things
as the fruit of her womb.” And the devotees of the
�5
idol, an artificer god, which he sought to break in
pieces, said, “Burn him, and avenge your god.” And
the Venetian Inquisitors did burn him at the stake.
Taking up Tyndall’s thought, we can now see that
the whole progress of science has seemed to strengthen
the protest and to give more strength to the doctrine
of Lucretius and Bruno, that “ matter, by its own
intrinsic force and virtue, brings these forms (of
nature) forth.”
Newton’s “Principia” went to show that, given,
in matter, the force and law of gravitation and the
laws of motion, there needed no artificer now to
conduct the solar system. The nebular hypothesis
of Kant and Laplace set forth that matter originally
needed no artificer to mould it into worlds, if we
suppose its particles scattered abroad in space
endowed with repulsion and attraction. They would
of themselves form rings, planets, satellites, and sun.
Dalton’s Chemistry showed that if we suppose a few
kinds of primordial atoms of different magnitudes, or
endowed with different forces and possessing certain
laws of attractive affinity, no artificer is necessary to
combine them into the innumerable compounds and
endow them with the qualities with which we are
familiar.
Darwin’s “ Origin of Species ” and
“ Descent of Man ” suggested that, given certain
organic forms of lowly type, no artificer was needed
to construct all the countless forms of organic nature.
For there were in these lowly forms intrinsic force and
virtue, by which they develop into higher forms, and
these into higher, until the ascidian becomes the man.
Herbert Spencer, and now Tyndall, suggest that even
in the inorganic forms of air, water, phosphorus, and
a few other elements, there are intrinsic force and
virtue to make them at some period or other of the
world’s history—Bastian says to make them now—of
themselves combine and form organisms of low type,
which develop, according to Darwin’s idea, even into
higher type ; therefore these inorganic atoms possess
�6
a latent life. Huxley would persuade us not only
that these inorganic atoms come in organic forms to
live, but that in the human brain they think and feel
and will. Thus every line of scientific inquiry seems
to have led to larger and larger belief in Bruno’s
intrinsic force and virtue of matter, making more
and more needless the conception of a Supreme
Artificer.
But we shall be mistaken if we suppose that this
antagonism between matter and God—that is, God
as the Artificer—has been felt only in the world of
science. It has been felt, too, though with less open
confession, in the world of religion. It has been
felt, it may be, where ignorance was bliss. As long
as science was unknown or ignored in the Church,
as during the Middle Ages, religions minds could
hold the belief in an artificer God without misgiving.
But as soon as science began to creep into the Church,
the paralysis of faith began. From that moment was
acted over again the story which the Greek poets
give us of the Theban Sphinx, the beautiful monster,
half-maid, half-lion, who, sitting on a rock, proposed
enigmas to the passers-by, and those who could not
answer them destroyed.
Beautiful but terrible science became the Sphinx.
She was always proposing to those who came near
her the enigma, “How can matter, which seems to
have force and virtue in it sufficient to account for
all things, have any need for an artificer Creator ? ”
And those who could not answer the question were
lost as to their faith in God. This, we believe, is
partly the explanation of the coldness and deadness
that came upon our Churches, especially our Pres
byterian Churches, during the last century. Ministers
and people had become more educated, they had
learnt something of the new science that was rising;
and then they heard the enigma of the Sphinx and
were troubled. Thenceforth it was a struggle with
them to believe. They had lost the child-like faith of
�7
their fathers. The old heartiness of prayer was gone.
Ministers and people began to be shy of strictly reli
gious topics, and to fall back on these ethical common
places of which they were more sure. And if this
same coldness and deadness has lasted on in some of
our churches till our own day, we suspect it has been
because there the old conception of God as the Arti
ficer has been maintained, whilst all the while the
Sphinx has been putting the question which has made
it unbelievable ; and that it is chiefly where the new
conception of the In-dwelling God has been introduced
through the influence of men like Dr Channing,
Martineau, and Theodore Parker, that the devotional
life has been again quickened and deepened.
Truly, then, men like Tyndall and Huxley, Spencer
and Darwin, with the terrible weapons of their
materialism, do but break down an old and much
battered idol which has long been the cause of dread
ful doubts, even to its own devotees, and has set
religion and science at bitter variance. But in
breaking down the idol they are doing us the greatest
service. They are letting in the light; they are
leaving us face to face with a conception of God
before hidden from us by our idol, but which presents
him to us not only in a form which science will allow
—before which, indeed, science and religion become
one—but in a form which is immeasurably grander,
more beautiful, and every way worthier of God than
that which has been broken down. Let us clearly
recognise that, when Tyndall claims for matter that
it is sufficient for everything, he is not thinking of
matter as that dead brute thing which the mass of
men suppose it. To him, as to Herbert Spencer,
matter is but the manifestation of a Great Entity, in
itself unknown and unknowable. It is but the
garment of what Tyndall calls the great cosmical
life—the great life of the cosmos—the Universe.
What is this Great Entity, what is this Great
Cosmical Life, but the Eternal God Himself, of whom,
�8
and through whom, and to whom are all things, who
“besets us behind and before,” and “ in whom we
live and move and have our being ” ? What is this
■conception suggested of the relation of God to the
world but that of the Psalmist—“The heavens shall
wax old as doth a garment, and as a vesture shalt
thou change them ” ? And what is this doctrine of
the unknown and unknowable life but that of Job?
“Lo ! these are parts of his ways, but how little a
portion is heard of him ! but the thunder of his power
who can understand ? ”
T. E. P.
FRITTED BY C. W. REYNELL, LITTLE PULTEKEY STREET, HAYMARKET.
�
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Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Title
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Professor Tyndall's inaugural address
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: [London]
Collation: 4 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Signed 'T.E.P.'; possibly Thomas Elford Poynting. The Address was given in Belfast to the British Association for the Advancement of Science on August 19, 1874. Reprinted from 'The Inquirer', September 5, 1874. Printed by C.W. Reynell, Little Pulteney Street, London. "The address before the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science was an occasion to state the aims and concerns of the premiere body of elite men of Victorian science. It was consequently one of the most prestigious places from which to pronounce on what men of science should be doing. John Tyndall famously used his address in 1874 to argue for the superior authority of science over religious or non-rationalist explanations. By the time of this address the Association had largely been taken over by the young guard, men like T.H. Huxley and Tyndall. Nevertheless, Tyndall's bold statement for rationalism and natural law was made in Belfast, a stronghold of religious belief then as now and so it was taken as an aggressive attack on religion. The address was popularly believed to advocate materialism as the true philosophy of science. It remains a powerful call for rationalism, consistency and scepticism." From Victorianweb: http://www.victorianweb.org/science/science_texts/belfast.html [accessed 12/2017].
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[Thomas Scott]
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[1874]
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G5529
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[Unknown]
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Philosophy
Rationalism
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Professor Tyndall's inaugural address), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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English
Conway Tracts
Materialism
Natural Law
Philosophy and Science
Rationalism
Science and Religion
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LIFE
AND
MIND:
THEIR
UNITY AND MATERIALITY.
•
BY
EOBERT LEWINS, M.D. '
x
“ If it be possible to perfect mankind, the means of doing so will be found
in the Medical Sciences.”
Descartes.
“ For that which befalls men befalls beasts ; as the one dies so does the
other; they have all one breath; all go unto one place; all are of the dust, and
all turn to dust again.”
Ecclesiastes, 3rd Chap., Verses 18, 19.
GEO. P. BACON, STEAM PRINTING OFFICES.
1873.
��LIFE
AND
MIND:
THEIR UNITY AND MATERIALITY.
By Robert Lewins, M.D.
The design of this short contribution to the philosophy of
Modern Science is one, the execution of which I have felt for
many years past, ever since the collapse of the European
equilibrium signalized by the outbreak of the Erench revolu
tion of 1848, to be a great desideratum in the current distracted
state of public opinion, especially in Great Britain, as to
the claims upon our belief of Divine Revelation at the existing
standpoint of science.
*
My present purpose is to attempt,
in quite popular and intelligible language, divested of all
technicality which is not familiar to all fairly educated persons,
to ascertain the verdict of modern physiology and pathology
on the real nature of life. Upon this physical basis, disre
garding all metaphysical systems, from Plato to Comte, as so
many ignesfatui, which have only served during thousands of
years of misdirected activity, to perplex and mislead the
human mind, I propose to formulate, in a few sentences, a
consistent and rational theory of human existence, in which
everything super-natural and exceptional to familiar, every
day observation and experience, is removed from the domain
of sense and fact into that of fancy and fable.f
I have chiefly at heart to bring to bear, in a purely scientific
and judicial spirit, on the so-called inspiration and infallibility
of our own Bible, one single, well-established physiological
canon, the non-existence of a vital or spiritual principle as an
entity apart from the inherent energy of the material organism.
* Volumes could not better illustrate the irreconcilable antagonism between
Revelation and Science, than the statement of so thoughtful a scholar as the
Archbishop of Canterbury, in his sermon on the text “Jesus wept,” at Tam,
beth Church on Hospital Sunday, 15th June, 1873, respecting Death. His Grace
seriously advocated.the untenable hypothesis now so thoroughly refuted by
Paleontology and Biology, that “ Death was a frightful thing, the memento
of Sin, for Sin gave it birth,” evidently under the conviction that the myth
in the Hebrew Scriptures of the Creation and Fall of Adam is a matter of fact.
t No dcubt both the poetical and metaphysical faculties are most essential
and important elements in human nature, but the legitimate end of imagination and philosophical speculation is to lead us to the possession of positive
facts practically useful in vulgar life. All records of intellectual processes
that stop short of this result, are—except during the brief period of our
education—impediments of right conduct, and only serve to cheat and beonile
us of our time. Action, not contemplation, is the true vocation of Man,
�4
This one fact alone, I am fully satisfied in my own mind,
proves conclusively that all super-naturalism, alike “ sacred
and profane,” is explicable by quite familiar phenomena of
deranged cerebration and innervation, and that, as a corollary,
the pretended “ fundamental truths of Christianity ” are pal
pable fallacies, ill-analysed and mis-interpreted signs of disordered functions of the brain and cranial nerve-centres, of no
more authority or claim to especial sanctity than analogous
pretensions in the case of the Koran, or other extinct or extant
idolatry. Mahomet, indeed, from being subject to epilepsy,
must be considered by modern pathology as labouring, during
his whole public career, which was much more extended than
that of the Prophet of Nazareth, under actual organic brain
disease, and the wide-spread religion of Islam may therefore be
dismissed at once, as a purely medical question, from the serious
notice of all who are not Pathologists. The Grecian Oracles,
also reverenced by the most civilized nation of antiquity as
superhuman utterances of Divine Wisdom, were merely the
ravings of women temporarily insane from the inhalation of
gases which disturbed, by poisoning the blood, their cerebral
functions. Insanity and Idiocy, to this day, are still venerated
in the native lands of Jesus and Mahomet as the manifestation
of divine inspiration.
*
Christianity will thus be found, when
examinedby the light of the 19th, to be simply what the impar
tial Greeks and Romans described it in the 1st century—a
Syrian superstition. Syria, the “ Holy Land” of the Bible and
Koran (as if in sound philosophy any one place or thing can
be holier than another) seems in all ages—doubtless from
geological and meteorological peculiarities!—to have been
notorious for the mysticism of its inhabitants ; by which term
I mean such excess of the idealising over the reflective faculties
that sober reason and observation, the seeing things as they
are in the open day-light of fact and nature, become quite
disguised and obscured by the phantasmagoria of illusion.
This radical defect, which necessitates the intellect to revolve
perpetually in a vieious circle, fatal to all real progress, is
characteristic of the human mind throughout all the East,
* Epilepsy, doubtless from its striking and imposing physiological symp
toms, was in ancient times regarded as the “Holy Disease,” par excellence.
Hippocrates no doubt incurred the odium attached to “Impiety,” when he
taught that no disease was more or less holy than another—all being alike
the result of impaired bodily organs.
f The scenery round Jerusalem and through the wilderness of Judea to
wards the Jordan, is exceedingly weird and hideous, well fitted to be the
nursery of an ascetic creed, “ whose Kingdom is not of this World.”
�5
as every impartial traveller perceives on a very cursory ac
quaintance.
An Oriental must mystify and “ fable/’ not necessarily by
intention, but because, from the structural arrangement of his
intellectual organs, exaggeration, hyperbole, and the prefer
ence of fiction to fact, is his natural element. To him Lord
Bacon’s aphorism is peculiarly applicable, “ A mixture of
a lie doth ever add pleasure.” In the whole texture of his
mind he displays the impulsive, visionary imaginativeness and
incapacity for patient and sustained impersonal research of
women and children, swayed by every fluctuating breath of
sentiment and passion. To minds of this class plain truth ap
pears insipid, displeasing, and unsatisfactory,in direct contrast
with that disciplined virile European intellect, which, in com
paratively recent times, by strict adherence to the investiga
tion of what really exists, has so immeasurably extended, for the
benefit of mankind, the range of mental vision. In the signal
triumphs of civilization during the last two centuries the
Orient, and the traditional methods of the Orient, have no part
whatever.
To return from this digression to my more immediate pur
pose. The single and simple cardinal principle of modern
science, above italicised, to which I would direct atten
tion, and to which I shall confine myself on the present
occasion—as subversive of all spiritualism and mysticism
whatever—is a plant of English growth, and cannot pro
perly be considered older, in its definite shape, than the
publication of Newton’s “ Principles of Natural Philosophy,”
the year before the revolution of 1688, though in a vague, in
definite form its spirit was awake in Europe from the time of
the Reformation. Our Royal Society was established, as
stated in its charter, at the Restoration of Charles II., as a
protest against “ supernatural ” methods, the Puritan Revolt
being the last sincere and earnest abortive attempt to govern
mankind on Christian principles, or to take au serieux in
political life, the truth of the Jewish Dispensation. Modern
Physical and Mental Science, dating from the English Revo
lution—the era of Newton and Locke—may thus justly be
considered the real Anti-Christ.
This radical principle of true knowledge, which the
human mind has only reached after persevering for
thousands of years in false methods, is the confidence,
based on fixed scientific data, and not merely on conjec
ture, in the all-sufficiency of Matter to carry on its own
operations, and the consequent absurdity, uselessness, non
�6
necessity of any hypothesis which assumes, that from outside
the sphere of sensible, material phenomena, there intrudes
an immaterial, spiritual, or supernatural factor, to perform
functions, which Matter, by virtue of its own in-dwelling
energy, really performs for and by itself. I confidently sub
mit to the judgment of my readers the assertion that the
whole hypothesis of Immaterialism, of an over-ruling of matter
by “ Spirit” (in the transcendental, not etymological sense of
the word), the former the passive instrument, the latter the
active agent, received its death-blow on the fall of the Car
tesian, and establishment of the Newtonian, Philosophy.
Our great English astronomer, by his discovery of universal
gravitation, was the real founder, in Christian times, of scien
tific, common sense materialism, though, from prejudices of his
own education in the scholastic methods of his age, he himself
failed to carry out his own data, to their legitimate conclu
sions, in the domain of Biology. The tremendous revolution in
European thought, at the close of the 17th century, can even yet
be well appreciated by comparing the mystical idealism of
Milton’s “ Paradise Lost” with the common sense realism of
Pope’s “Essay on Man.” Erom the awe-struck manner in which
the intellectual representative of Puritanism hails Light as
too sacred even to be named, we recognise the fatal tendency
of that primeval mysticism which renders free thought, free
investigation, and real progress, an impossibility. There is no
room for doubt, from his cosmological and psychological stand
point, that had Milton been aware of the prismatic exjferiments and cosmical demonstrations of Newton, he would have
turned from them with abhorrence and proud contempt.
*
To
* Socrates, who has been considered by not a few orthodox • authorities to
have had a quasi Divine Mission, as a forerunner of Christ, protested against
the impudence and profanity of Anaxagoras, when he degraded the divine
Helios and Selene into a Sun and Moon of calculable motions and magni
tudes. Astronomy was pronounced by him to be among the “ Divine Mys
teries,” which it was impossible to understand and madness to investigate, as
the above-named physicist had presumptuously pretended to do. He held,
indeed, that the Gods did not intend that man should pry into cosmical
arrangements, that they managed such things so as to be beyond bis ken,
and therefore logically discarded General Physics, or the study of Nature al
together as impious madness. “ Moral Philosophy ” he considered alone fit
for Humanity. Natural Science he taught to be Celestial Arcana, that would
for ever remain inscrutable secrets to mankind. And, as far as we can see,
that remained the mediaeval standpoint only fully displaced, spite of the ad
mirable but incomplete labours of Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Kepler, and
Galileo, by the discovery of Universal Gravitation. Both Bacon and Milton,
scholars at the high water mark of the knowledge of their respective epochs,
disbelieved the true system of the universe.—See Grote’s “ History of Greece,”
chap. Ixviii.
�us, at all events, a century and a half later, it seems perfectly
patent, whatever may have been the doubts and quibbles of
Newton, Locke, and their learned and unlearned contemporaries, that as soon as it became a demonstrated fact thatMatter
was active, not passive, and that its every particle was in
motion itself, and the cause of motion in every other particle
—the belief in an energising principle as a separate entity,
apart and distinct from Matter itself, became an untenable
fallacy. The whole fabric of Immaterialism, the idea of the
necessity of supernatural influence in inorganic matter, was
annihilated at once.
And the generalization cannot be restricted to “brute”
matter, but is equally applicable to the organic kingdom
of nature, to plants, animals, and man. Sensibility and
voluntary motion (animal life), just as in the case of the selfacting cosmos, is not the outcome of a vital or senso-motor
principle, spiritual or immaterial—animating, vivifying or
vitalising the material organization, but just as in the simpler,
though not less wonderful (for in an infinite scale there are
no absolute degrees) case of inanimate matter—animal vitality
or conscious existence, with all its marvellous and complicated
processes of body and mind, is merely the active expression of
the material machinery of the microcosm. In this microcosm
special anatomical structures or tissues manifest special func
tions, one of them being consciousness—egoistic and altruistic
— of which mentation or cerebration is only a mode. Thought
and Moral Feeling is thus only localised sensation, the special
life of the hemispheres of the brain, organs familiarly known
to be exceptionally developed in the human, as compared with
all other animals. Modern physiology, just as in the case of
modern physics, has been compelled entirely to discard the
Oriental, classical, mediaeval, metaphysical, ante-Newtonian
speculation that organic function has for its factor a spiritual
or immaterial entity or soul. The question of the anima
mundi and anima humana (using the term in the sense of
soul) is at bottom one and the same. The speculation, ex
plicable and excusable even so late as the prevalence of the
Cartesian system, while the erroneous idea of the inertness of
matter vitiated Philosophy, had no longer a locus standi after
its refutation by Newton. If matter acts by means of its own
vis insita, and depends on no extraneous “influx” or im
pulse, the whole problem of Immaterialism and Materialism
is solved in favour of the latter. No modern physiologist has
any difficulty in realising what seemed so insuperable a
stumbling block to the Ancients and Locke—that sensation
�8
and thought is due to matter (nerve substance). The whole
difficulty seems to us purely imaginary, depending on precon
ceived fancies as to the twofold existence of spirit and
matter in the universe, and the inferiority of the latter to
the former — ideas of no greater value than the old
prejudice of mathematicians as to the “ perfection” of the
circle, so mischievous in astronomical discovery—or the fanci
ful notion of peculiar sanctity attached to the numbers 3 and
7. We know nerves feel or sensate. We know equally well,
both from physiology and pathology, that a special portion of
the nervous system (the hemispheres of the brain) thinks. From
*
the medical or natural stand-point, the metaphysical notion
that man is a dual being, compounded of soul and body, is in
reality only the last lingering relic of the vicious, obsolete
School-Physiology—the parent of occult therapeutical prac
tice in the middle ages, and familiar in medical literature as
the system of Van Helmont, a Flemish physician, who died
about the time of Sir Isaac Newton’s birth. This system was
based on the fallacy of the essential passivity of matter,
and pre-supposed that in every organ of the body there is an
Archeus, a ruling spirit, an Eu-demon in health, a kako-demon
in disease—the active agent in function, whose sole raison
d'etre is the presumed incapacity of matter, “ living or dead,”
to exhibit, proprio motu, energy of any kind. This theory,
* “ That the hemispheres of the Brain are the seats of the intellectual
faculties—viz., Emotion, Passion, Volition, and at the same time essential
to Consciousness—may be considered proved by these established facts:—
(1.) In the Animal Kingdom a correspondence is observed between the
quantity of grey matter, the depth of the convolutions, and the sagacity of
the animal.
(2.) At birth the grey matter in those parts is very defective, the convolu
tions being only superficial fissures confined to the surface of the Brain; and
as the grey matter increases intelligence develops.
(3.) Vivisection shows that on slicing away the Brain the animal becomes
more dull and stupid in proportion to the quantity of grey matter removed.
(4.) Clinical experience points out that in cases where disease has been
found to commence at the circumference of the Brain (that is at the hemi
spherical convolutions) and proceeds towards the centre, the mental faculties
are affected first; whereas in those diseases which commence at the central
parts and proceed towards the circumference, the mental faculties are affected
last.”—See Dr. Aitkin’s “Science and Practice of Medicine.”
To my mind the whole question at issue between Spiritualism and
Materialism, is solved in favour of Hylozoism, by the fact stated in No. 3 of
the a bove quotation from Dr. Aitkin’s invaluable Text Book of Medicine.
Slicing the hemispherical ganglia of the Encephalon induces insensibility
and stupidity, which is equivalent to stating it impairs the mind and moral
feelings. No physical pain, no paralysis is the result, a fact dwelt on by early
vivisectors with astonishment; only a purely mental one, which surely de
monstrates that the organ injured is the primary seat of the mind—the “ Dome
of Thought, the Palace of the Soul.” We should certainly conclude that such
was the case from similar experimental results in any other organ.—R. L.
�9
identical with that of Divine and Demoniac possession in the
Bible, which is quite incompatible with rational, theoretical
and practical Physic, has long since fallen even into popular
contempt as regards every other organ or series of organs
in the body, except the Sensorium.
*
The radical antithesis between the old dual doctrine of
Body animated by Spirit and modern Physiology, may be well
illustrated by reference to the different views as to the
rationale of “ suspended animation” in the two systems. In
the one, where matter is held to be essentially inert—a vital
principle—an animating spirit—must be assumed, which in
syncope, asphyxia, &c., deserts its material tenement to
emigrate as an indestructible, veritable entity elsewhere. In
*
the other modern scientific one we have with complete reason,
and on sufficient grounds, abandoned this separation of soul
and body, this emigration, during periods of insensibility and
immobility, of the former to other spheres of activity. We now
know, as certainly as we know any other demonstrated fact of
science, to mention no other grounds for our certainty than
the mechanical means of treatment successfully employed for
the restoration of the apparently dead, that life resides in
tissue as an immanent energy, with its corollary, that suspen
sion of life is the consequence of the derangement, the arrest
of those material conditions (the ultimate link in the chain of
which is the contact of the oxygen of the atmosphere through
the arterial circulation with the tissues), exactly as takes
place in the case of a watch which ceases to “ go” from
derangement of its works.f
The bearing of this unity, and not duality of nature in man
on what are called the “ fundamental truths of Divine Revela
tion,” must be apparent at a glance. What has been mistaken
for supernatural interference resolves itself into Hypereesthesia or Anaesthesia, dependent on increased or diminished
nervous and cerebral action. It is quite unnecessary, from
this physiological vantage ground, to allude seriously to the
portents, miracles, prophecies, &c., claimed by mystagogues,
successful or unsuccessful, which sanction their pretensions, as
exceptionally privileged beings, to dictate authoritatively to
their fellow creatures the behests of Heaven, from Moses to
* Error dies hard. In a modified form this old fallacy again reared its
head, during the chloroform controversy in 1848.—See Dfemoir of Sir James Y.
Simpson, by Professor Puns, P.D. Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1873.
f The discredit into which Exorcism has fallen shows, that even in the un
scientific mind, material force has been substituted for “ vagrant spirit,”
now “in” now “ out of the body,” as the active agent in vitality.
�10
Pius IX., and the author of the Book of Mormon. All such
must be uncompromisingly negatived by science in the 19th
century as impostures—conscious or unconscious—the pro
mulgator of an untruth not being, of course, less an im
postor from being his own first dupe, even though he be
the victim of circumstances beyond his own direct control.
It were an impertinence in the present state of physiology
and physics, to argue in refutation of the incredible assertion
that human beings can arrest the motions of sun and moon,
change water into wine, lay the winds and waves by a word,
cure old standing or congenital organic disease or deformity
instantaneously by a touch, by the invocation of any name
under Heaven, or in any other way alter or suspend the re
gular order of the universe by means corresponding with the
idea of a miracle in theology. When we eliminate from matter
the vital principle we nullify entirely the venerable hypothesis
of Divine or diabolic inspiration and possession, and give
scientific sanction to the Sadducean doctrine that all reported
visions of angels and spirits, good or evil, are spectral appear
ances—-symptoms of disturbed bodily function of organs with
in the skull, “ coinages of the brain, bodiless creations,” like
the apparition in Hamlet and apparitions everywhere else.
Such assumed supernatural visitations as the “ descent of
the Holy Ghost” at Pentecost, and the conversion of Paul, to
whom, and not directly to Jesus Christ or any of his immediate companions and disciples, Protestantism is chiefly
indebted for its Evangelical doctrines, on his journey to
Damascus—phenomena lying at the very root of the alleged
Divine origin of Christianity—belong to the very alphabet of
medical science, and may be confidently diagnosed as not pre
ternatural occurrences at all, but merely symptoms of over
excitement—the result either of Anaemia or Hyperaemia—of the
nervous centres in the head. “ The sound from Heaven as of
a rushing, mighty wind, the cloven tongues of fire,” are symp
toms familiar to every clinical tyro of morbid action in the en
cephalic sensory ganglia connected with the auditory and
optic nerves, and are, indeed, only exaggerations of that
“ singing in the ears” and “ floating of motes” before the
eyes, which every one who reads this must have himself ex
perienced from the most trifling derangement, centric or
eccentric, of the circulation of the blood within the brain, or
from over-tension of the brain, eye, or ear nerve-tissue itself.
The exaltation of the faculty of speech—a parallel case to
which is well known as the Irvingite epidemic of “ Unknown
tongues”—is also the external sign of excited function at the
�origin in the brain of another cranial nerve, the lingual or
motor nerve of the tongue. The mental tumult, panic, and
metamorphosis of ideas, feelings, and character, are also quite
ordinary symptoms consequent on the participation of the
cerebral hemispheres—seat of the moral feelings, ideas, and
character—in the excited condition of the adjacent sensory
ganglia. Identical symptoms, affecting both the organs of
sense and the mental and moral faculties, are now quite
familiar to us as exhibited by fanatics in “ camp meetings,”
a,nd religious revivals, not uncommon since Whitfield and
Wesley’s time, in Great Britain, North America, and Protes
tant Ireland. All such occurrences, whether they happened
1800 years ago in Palestine, or yesterday at our own doors,
have no connection whatever with supra-mundane agency,
but are simply the usual, constantly recurring, every-day
indications of abnormal states of the sensorium.
The conversion of Paul falls under the same category, and
resolves itself into an apoplectiform attack of the nature of
sun-stroke with temporary amaurosis—a very common sequel
to protracted cerebral tension and excitement, the probable
proximate cause of the paroxysm, the active symptoms of
which only lasted three days, though, as often happens in
illness of this character, it revolutionized the whole future
life of the sufferer, being exposure to the noon-day blaze of an
Eastern sun. Such instances of mistaken diagnosis merit as
little notice, other than professional, from contemporary
medicine, as do the tales of witchcraft in former ages, or the
shameful spiritualistic delusion of to-day. All such supposed
evidences of supernatural power are merely indications of
natural bodily infirmity.
*
* The conversion of Colonel Gardiner, a well known cavalry officer, killed
at the battle of Preston Pans, described by Dr. Doddridge, is another instance
of the same kind, identical in its leading features with that of Paul. It was
attended by similar ocular and acoustic hallucinations, and instantaneous
life-long change of character and conduct, clearly traceable to recent con
cussion of the brain from an accident—a fall from his horse. It may also be
mentioned that two famous mystagogues who have recently aspired to found
new religions, Swedenborg and Comte, were in like manner the subjects of
Brain affection. The case of the former has been most exhaustively treated by
Dr. Maudsley in the “ Journal of Mental Science,” in a series of articles, which
I have vainly attempted to induce him to make more accessible to the general
public than they can be in the pages of a professional journal. The medical
history of Swedenborg is, wiutatis mutandis, that of all successful
“ Madmen who have made men mad
By their contagion; Conquerors and Kings,
Pounders of Sects and Systems.”
Comte’s natural history is still a desideratum. Ordinary biographies of the
founder of the “ Religion of Humanity,” with all its extravagances and anach
ronisms, lacking physiological and pathological elucidation, are worthless
and misleading.
�12
As a necessary part of my argument, however, lam anxious
to bring to bear upon the doctrine of a personal immortality—
a doctrine which still seems to flourish amid the present
wreck (at least on the Continents of Europe and America,
and to a greater extent even in Great Britain than easy
going people and their supporters, either from sentiment or
interest), of time-honoured creeds are willing to allow—the
above fact of the unity, and not duality of nature in man.
This belief, from the premises that there is in the human
being, just as in inorganic and the lower animal creation, no
such thing as a soul at all, must be dismissed to the limbo
of other exploded superstitions. No doubt every mind capable
of abstract thought has within itself, as the reflex, minister
and interpreter of nature, which is in itself endless and
eternal, the sense or feeling of immortality, of endlessness in
time and space. Without that feeling we should be, indeed,
strangers and aliens on this planet, itself only an atom in
the infinite abyss of Immensity. Time and space are, in
deed, not natural verities at all, but merely artificial, braincreated segments and analyses of eternity and immensity.
Nature herself ignores all such limitations. Her only realities
and syntheses are eternity as regards time, and immensity as
regards space. All that has been said or sung, in prescientific ages, of God or Gods, may be predicated in this our
age of the material universe, beyond which it is impossible for
the human mind to range. Higher than himself no man can
think. And this idea, this sensation of endless duration in
time and extension in space—a sensation never absent
for weal or woe in minds capable of high abstract power
—but in the average mind only paroxysmally present—forced,
too often horribly, on the attention in moments of exalted
feeling, pain, terror, suspense, actual or anticipated tor
ture, sleeplessness, dreams, nightmare, or under the
action of certain narcotics, as opium, haschiz, and al
cohol, has been confounded by precipitate theorists with
the literal idea of resurrection from the dead, and a
future eternal life of happiness or misery, apart from our
present bodies, or with those bodies in a “ glorified” form. '
*
* I need surely waste no words, at the present day, in pointing out the fatal
fallacies and inconsistencies contained in the apology for this theory, in the
15th chap. 1st Corinthians, and elsewhere in the New Testament. No doubt
it is a beautiful dream, looked at from the elect point of view, as there
represented; but the truth is more beautiful still. Fruition is better than
expectation, performance than promise, actual experience than faith or
hope.
�13
The apparently different ideas of ante-natal existence which.
I forms part of most Oriental creeds, and is known to Occi
dental scholars a.s the Pythagorean doctrine of the Me
tempsychosis, and the modern Christian one of a post-mortem
individual immortality, are really one and the same chimerical
notion. Both are relegated, by sober, scientific analysis, from
the domain of the actual into th it of the ideal. Both are
alike the ill-analysed, empirical conception, the cerebral
function, untrained by scientific discipline, frames to itself of
the infinite, the eternal—in the one case as applied to the
past, in the other to the future. An actual, veritable im
mortality is perfectly superfluous, seeing we have already, in
our present state of being, an ideal one in the sense of it.
“ Heirs of immortality’’ we certainly are, but not in the
theological sense of the phrase. Only in so far as during
every pulse beat between the cradle and the grave our minds
have an instinctive sense, more or less definite, of endless
duration and extension. Man, then, as a sentient being, is
launched into eternity, not when he dies, for at death he
returns to the same condition of nothingness, as far as
consciousness is concerned, as was the case prior to his
embryonic existence, but when the first stirrings of life,
including the life of the brain or ideation, begin. Healthy
sensation, or perfect life in every organ, including the cerebral
hemispheres, is thus our only heaven, morbid sensation, vary
ing as it does from ennui or general malaise to mental and
corporeal agony and anguish, our only hell. Earth is paradise,
if the healthy operation of every anatomical structure could be
preserved ; perpetual sunshine of body and mind is the blessed
result— a beatitude implied in the physiological aphorism, “ the
normal exercise of every organic function is pleasurable.”
Wherever, therefore, malaise of body or mind is present, its
cause must be sought for in deranged bodily function, and in
no “ higher ” or more recondite region. All that is fabled
by poets, saints, martyrs, founders of sects and systems',
under the term Saturnian or Golden Age, Kingdom of
Heaven, Paradise, &c., is comprehended in that supreme
bien aise which results from the equilibrium of the bodily
functions. That state, and that alone, in which, as in
healthy infancy, no portion of the nervous system, indicating
loss of general balance of the organism, obtrudes itself
on our attention, is the true palingenesia, whether of
mythology, philosophy, or Christianity. To attain and
preserve that state of normal and material well being—
�14
discarding all more transcendental aspirations as a mis
chievous and vainglorious Utopia and fool’.s paradise, •
ought all our efforts to be exclusively directed. It will be
found, on experience, to have nothing in common with the
“ Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die ” principle of
the degenerate Epicurean, but to require for its attainment
and preservation Herculean labours, taxing to their utmost
legitimate limits, the vaunted intellectual and moral capacity
of our race.
The following twelve theses—partly taken from the German
—summarise the chief points contended for in this paper:—
1st. The genuine disciple of Nature and Life, which are one and in
divisible, takes nothing on trust, but only believes what is known
with positive certainty—that is, on data which can be universally
verified.
2nd. Doubt is not, as Fiction pretends, the herald of dismay and
despair, but the necessary preliminary of all order and progress ; as
without it there cannot be any inquiry, clear insight, or settled
convictions whatever.
3rd. Natural Science is bound in conscience to divulge all her
results, however much they may conflict with contemporary prejudices,
in order to satisfy the human mind and leave it free for the further
pursuit and enjoyment of truth. Mental Reservation and Prevarica
tion, as habitually practised by contemporary English thinkers and
savans, is disloyalty to humanity | and reason; dangerous alike to their
*
country, and to the cause of civilization throughout the world.
4th. Natural Philosophy in recent times has rendered trite the
axiom, that everything in the universe proceeds by unalterable law.
5th. The sum total of Natural Law constitutes the system of the
world (axiomatic truths of logic and mathematics).
6th. The world is from eternity to eternity. Nothing is ever
created, nothing lost. Beginning or ending there is alike none. Only
the form and condition of things is perishable. Everything that exists
dates from eternity.
7th. The Universeis boundless in space and time. The divisibility
* England, as represented by her influential and cultured classes, from her
pre-eminent adherence to the obsolete cause of traditional Supernaturalism,
and consequent inaccessibility to the new order of ideas resulting from the
light thrown on Nature and Human Nature by Science—presents in the 19th
century a striking analogy to the brandy of Spain during the struggles of
the Reformation. Lord Shaftesbury’s inhuman dictum at Exeter Hall, on the
30th June, as chairman of the meeting, convened by the Church Association,
to protest against the confessional in the English Church: “ Perish all things
so that Christ be magnified,” is identical in spirit with that of the Grand
InquisitiZffe'in “Don Carlos:” “The voice of Nature avails not over Faith.”
Truly, as Milton says: “ Presbyter is only Priest writ large.” Absit omen.
�15
of matter is infinite. The Universe can have no limits, eternity in
time and immensity in space being correlative.
Sth. As the logical inference from the above, millions and millions
of millennia are before ns, in which new worlds and systems of worlds
shall flourish and decay ; at their lapse the Universe can be no nearer
its dissolution than at the present or any former period.
9th. Cosmical space is not a vacuum. Our atmosphere has no
limits. The first living being had its germ in eternity, which is equi
valent to negativing Creation altogether. The present human being
is only a link in an endless series—the goal of a past—the startingpoint of a future developmental form in the Animal Kingdom,
10th. The so-called “ Personal God ” is merely an idol of the
human brain—a pseudo-organism of pre-scientific man endowed with
man’s attributes and passions, a remnant of Fetichism. Jehovah,
Jove, or the “ Lord and Father” of the New Testament, are alike
anthropomorphic inventions. Absolute Atheism is, however, no pos
tulate of Science, which does not venture to impugn the evidence of
Cosmical Design, or the existence of an unknown, inconceivable, in
telligent First Cause, of whose Eternal Mind, the Eternal Universe
may be a hypostasis. Some such belief is indeed a necessity during the
earlier stages of our life, while, even in the soundest intellect, imagmation is dominant over judgment.
11th. The further development of our race in intellect and moral
feeling depends chiefly on education—the disuse of a priori, in
tuitive methods, and the systematic practice of rational habits of
thought based on actual experience. At bottom this is equivalent to
saying, superior enlightenment depends on proper exercise, in every
possible direction, of the cerebral hemispheres.
12th. No satisfactory progress in virtue or happiness can he hoped
for till the present supernatural theory of existence is overthrown,
and the docile study of the great Book of Nature and Life, with its
invariable sequences of cause and effect, supersedes the arbitrary, anarchic authority of falsely called “ Divine Revelation.”
��
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Victorian Blogging
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Life and mind: their unity and materiality
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Lewins, Robert
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Place of publication: Lewes
Collation: 15 p. ; 22 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Extensive footnotes.
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Geo. P. Bacon, printers
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1873
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G5360
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Life and mind: their unity and materiality), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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Text
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English
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Materialism
Philosophy
Conway Tracts
Materialism
Philosophy and Science