PROFESSOR TYNDALL'S ADDRESS.

Thames Star, Volume VII, Issue 1952, 7 April 1875, Page 4

PROFESSOR TYNDALL'S ADDRESS.

Address delivered before Hie Sr'dish Association, assembled at Belfast, toit7i additions, ly Jofin Tgndall, F.R.S., President. London: lojs'&mans, Gbeen, akb Co., 1874 [continued.] ' Lucretius, as you are aware, reached a precisely opposite conclusion ; and it certainly would be interesting, if not profitable, to us all, to hear what he would or could urge in opposition to the reasoning of the Bishop. As a brief discussion of the point will enable us to see the bearings of am important question, I will here permit a disciple of Lucretius to try the strength of the Bishop's position, and then allow the Bishop to retaliate, with the view of rolling back, if he can, the difficulty upon Lucretius.

The argument might proceed in this fashion :—

' Subjected to the test of mental presentation (Varstellung), your views, most honoured prelate, would present to many minds a great, if not an insup-rable difficulty. You speak of " living powers," " percipient or perceiving powers,'' and " ourselves;'" but can you form a mental picture of any one of these apart from the organism through which it is supposed to act? Test jrourself honestly, and see whether you possess any faculty that would enable you to form such a conception. The true self has a local habitation in e?jch of us ; thus localized, must it not possess a form ? If so, , what form ? Have you ever for a moment, realized it? j When a leg is amputated the body is divided into two parts ; is the true self in both of them or in one? Thomas A quinas might say in both ; but not 3 ou, for you appeal to the consciousness associated with one of the two parts to prove that the other is foreign matter. Is) consciousness, then, a necessary element of the true self? If so, what dp you say to th« case of the whole body being deprived of consciousness P If not, then on what grounds do you deny any portion of the true self to the severed limb P It seems very singular that, from the beginning to the end of your admirable book (and no one admires its sober strength more than I do), you never once mention the brain or nervous system. You begin at one end of the body, and show that its parts may be removed without prejudice to the perceiving power. "What if you begin at the other end, and. remove, instead of the leg, the brain ? The body, as .before,,is divided into two parts ; but both are now in the same predicament, and neither.can be appealed to to, prove that the other is foreign matter. Or, instead of going so far as to, remove the brain itself, let a certain portion of its bony covering; be removed, and let a rhythmic series of pressures and relaxations of pressure be applied to the soft substance. At every pressure " the faculties^ pf perception and of action" ' vanish-; *t^T«T rpUw»tron of prw»»ere they are restored Where, during the intervals, of pressure, is' the s perceiving ' power? I once had the discharge-of a Jarge Leydon battery passed unexpectedly through me.: I felt nothing, but was simply blotted out of conscious existence for a .sensible, interval. Where was my true self during that interval ? Men who. have recovered from lighting-stroke have been much longer in the same state;; and indeed in cases of-erdinary concussion of the brain, days may elapse during which so experience iis registered in consciousness. Where is the man himself during .tiie period of insensibilityf You- vaAj^ Bay tnat I beg the question when I assume the man to have been,, unconscious, that he was really conscious all the time, and has simply Ibrimtton what bad occurred to him. In reply'to'this, I can only say that no one need shrink from the worst tortures that superstition ever invented7f ©nly so felt and so remembered. 130 not think your theory of instrumeat goes at all to the bottom—ol: the matter. A telegraph*operator has his instruments,, by meaus of wliicli he converses with the word; 'ourMtioiiies possess a, nervous system which plays a similar part; between the ■■perceiving power and external things." Cut the .wires, of the operator,- break his battery, demagnetize his needle. by this means y.ou certainly sever his connexion with the world ; but inasmuch as, these are real instruments, .their destruction does not touch the man who usei them. The operator survives," ewd'he knows that he survives. What is it, I would ask, in the human system that answers „to this conscious survival of the operate^ when the battery of the" brain is so dis|urbe*d as to produce- insensibility, or w&en it is destroyed altogether ?• • 4 Another consideration, which you may consider slight, presses upon me with some force. The brain may change from health to disease, and through such a change the xnost exemplary man may be converted into a debauchee or a murderer. My rery noble, and approved good master had, as you knoW, threatenings of lewdness introduced into his brain by his jealous wife's philter; and sooner than permit himself to run even the risk of yielding to these base promptings he slew himself. How could the hand of Lucretius have been thus turned against himself if the real Lucretius remained as before ? Can the brain or can it not act in this distempered way without the intervention of the immortal reason? If it can, then it is a prime mover wlbich requires only healthy regulation to render it reasonably selfacting, and there is no apparent need of your immortal reason at all. If it cannot, then the immortal reason, by its mischievous activity in operating upon a broken instrument, must have the credit .of committing every imaginable extraragance and crime. I think, if you will allow me to say so, that the gravest consequences are likely to flow from yonr estimate of the body. To regard the brain as you would a staff or an eye-glass

—to shut your eyes to all its mystery, to the perfect correlation of its condition and our consciousness, to the fact that a slight excess or defect of blood in it produces the very swoon to which you refer, and that in relation to it our meat and drink and air and exercise have a perfectly transcendental value and significance—to forget all this does, I think, open a way to innumerable errors in our habits of life, and may possibly in some cases initiate and foster that very disease, and consequent mental ruin, which a wiser appreciation of this mysterious organ would have avoided.'

I can imagine the Bishop thoughtful after hearing this argument. He was not the man to allow anger to mingle with the consideration of a point of this kind. After due reflection, and having strengthened himself by that : honest contemplation of the facts which was habitual with him, and which includes the desire to give even adverse facts their due weight, I can suppose the Bishop to proceed thus :—' You will remember that in the "Analogy of Religion," of which you have so kindly spoken, I did not profess to prore anyihing absolutely, and that I over and over a^ain acknowledged and insisted on the smallness of our knowledge, or rather the depth of our ignorance, as regards the. whole system of the universe. My object was to show my deistical friends, who set forth so eloquently the beauty and beneficence of .Nature and the Ruler thereof, while !hey had nothing but scorn for the so-called absurdities of^ the Christian scheme, that they were in no better condition than we were, and that, for every difficulty found upon our side, quite as great a difficulty was to be found uporv theirs. I will now with your permission, adopt a similar line of argument. You are a Lucretian, and from the combination and separation of insensate atoms deduce all terrestrial things, including organic forms and their phenomena. Let me tell you, in the first instance how far I am prepared to go with you. I admit tbat_ you can build crystalline forms out of this play of molecular force; that the diamond, amethyst, and snow-star are truly wonderful structures whith are thus produced. I will go further and acknowledge that even a tree or flower might in this way be organized. N ay, if you can show me an animal without sensation, I will concede to you that it also .might be put. together by the suitable play of molecular force. •

' Thus far our way is clear ; but now comes mj difficulty. Your atoms are individually without sensation, much more are they without intelligence. May I ask you, then, to try your hand upon this problem? Take your dead hydrogen atoms, your dead oxygen atoms, your dead carbon atoms, your dead nitrogen atoms, your dead phosphorus atoms, and all the other atoms, dead as grains of shot, of which the brain is formed. Imagine them separate and |r«**^^l«*^, obs.exra — tbpni . running. I fogether and forming aT[l imaginable cdmbinatidns. This, as a wpjttr.ely mechanical processes seeable by the mind. But can you see, or dream, or in-any way imagine, how out of that mechanical act, and from these individually dead"atoms, sensation, thought, and emotion are'-to arise ? Are you lively-to extract Homer out efthe ;ratrft£gf > of dice, or the * Pifferential Calculus out, of the clash of billiard-balls ? lam not all' bereft of this Vorstt-llungs-ifo^of which, you, speak, nor am I, like so many of mjr.brethern,. a mere vacuum as irefiards scientific knowledge. I can . follow-a particle; of miislt until it reaches the olfactory nerve; I .can follow the waves of sound, until their tremors reach, the water of the labyrinth and set the otoliths and Corti's fibres in motion ; I can also visualize the waves of ether as they cross the eye and hit the retina. .Nay, more, I am able to pursue to the central organ the motion thus imparted at the periphery, and to see in idea the very molecules of the brain thrown into tremors*-My insight is not baffled,by., .these physical,, processes. baffles^ and bewilders' me, is the not on that fromthose phj^iOaLtremorjL^tliingi so utterly incongrififcsfe 'with ;t£em~ as sensation", thoug^t^lfcnd emoti€|k can ,l?e derived: You maf^iijr, 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. But I beg to say that it is. For such incongruity as the flash possesses is that which I now fore? upon your attention. The flash is an affair of consciousness, the objective counterpart of which is a vibration. It is.a flash only by your interpretation. You are the cause, dt th&Japparent incongruity, and you are- the thing that puzzles* me. I need not remind j-ou that the great Liebnitz felt the difficulty which I feel, and that to get rid of this monstrous deduction of life from death he displaced your atoms by his monads, which were more or less perfect mirrors of the universe, and but of the summation and integration, of which he supposed all the phenomena of life—sentient, intellectual, and emotional—to arise.

' Your difficulty, then, as I see you are ready to admit, is quite as great as mine, You cannot satisfy the human understanding in its demand for logical continuity between molecular processes and phenomena of consciousness. This is a rock on which materialism must inevitably split whenever it pretends to be a complete philosophy of life. What is the moral, my Lucretian P You and I are not likely to indulge in ill-temper in the discussion of these great topics, where we see so much room for honest differences of opinion. But there are people of less wit or more bigotry (I say it with humility) on both sides, who are ever ready to mingle anger and vituperation with such discussions. There are, for example, writers of note and influence at the present day who are not ashamed to

assume the " deep personal sin" cf a great logician to be the cause of his unbelief in a theologic dogma. And there are others who hold that we, who cherish our noble Bible, wrought a 9 it has been into the constitution of our forefathers, and by inheritance into us, must necessarily be hypocritical and insincere. Let us disavow and discountenance such people, cherishing the unswerving faith that what is good and true in both our arguments will be preserved for the benefit of humanity, while all thai; is bad or false will disappear.' I hold the Bishop's reasoning to be unanswerable, and his liberality to be worthy of imitation. It is worth remarking that in one respect the Bishop was a product of his age. Long previous to his day the nature of the soul had been so favourite and general a topic of discussion, that, when the students of the University of Paris wished to know the leanings of a new Professor, they at once requested him to lecture upon the soul. About the time of Bishop Butler the question was not only agitated but extended. It was seen by the clear-witted men wl\o entered this arena that many of their best arguments applied equally to brutes and men. The Bishop's arguments were of this character. He saw it, admitted it, accepted the consequences, and boldly embraced the whole animal world in his scheme of immortality. (To he continued)