PROFESSOR TYNDALL'S ADDRESS.

Thames Star, Volume VII, Issue 1977, 6 May 1875, Page 3

PROFESSOR TYNDALL'S ADDRESS.

Address delivered before tlie British Association, assembled at- 'Belfast, toith additions, by John Tyndall, F.R.8., President. London: TouaMiNS, Green, and Co., 1874.

[COHTIUTTED.] ■ ; With the,jna*s of materials furnished ,by the physicist and physiologist in his hands, Mr Herbert Spencer, twenty years ago, sought to graft upon this basis a system of psychology; and two years ago a second and greatly amplified edition of his work appeared. Those who have: occupied.,thenw^lves with the- beautiful experiments of Plateau will remember that whe^|two spherules of olive-oil,: suspended'in a mixture of alcohol and; water of the same density as the oil, are: brought together, they do not immediately unite. CSomphing like* a pjellicle appears to !belformed^ around the;,drops, the; rupture of which is immediately followed, by the coalescence of the globules into; one. There are organisms whose vital; actions are almost as purely physical as;, that of these drops of oil. They comeinto'contact fand; fuse themselves thus • together. {Prom such organisms to others; a shade higher, and from these to others a shade higher still, and on through an erer-ascending series, Mr Spencer conducts his argument. There are two obvious factors to v be here talced into acco^ntrrthe'creature ap'4 the medium in which it lives, or, as it is often expressed, the organism and its • environment. Mr Spencer's fundamental principle is that, between these two factors there is incessant interaction. The organism is played; upon by.-the environment* and is modifiedto meet the requirements of the environment. Life he defines to be 'a •ontinuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations.'

in the lowest organisms we hare a kind of tactual sense diffused, over, the entire "body; "then, through impressions from -without and their corresponding adjustments, special, portions of the surface become more responsive to stimuli than others. The senses are nascent, the basis of all of them being r that simple tactual sense which the sage Democritus, recognised 2,300 years ago as their common progenitor. The, action of light, in : the first instance, appears to be a mere I disturbance of the chemical processes in j the animal organism, similar to that which .occurs in the leaves of plants. By 1 degree? the action becomes localized in a few pig'mentTcellsr-more sensitive to light than the surrounding tissue. The eye is here incipient. - At first it is merely capable of revealing differences of light, and .shade produced by bodies close at hand; r followed as the interception of the light is in almost all cases by the contact of; the; closely adjacent opaque body, sight in this "condition becomes a kind of ? anticipatory,- ; touch.' The adjustment continues; a slight bulging out of the epidermis over the! ■ pigment-granules (supervenes. A lens is incipient, and, through, the:,operation of infinite adjustments, at length reaches the perfection that it displays in the hawk and eagle; So of the other senses; they are, special digweniiations: of a.: tissue ■which was bri ginally vaguely 'sensitive all over., * TVTith the development of the senses the adjustments between the organism and its environment gradually extend in space, a. multiplication. experiences and a -corresponding modification of conduct being .the result. The adjustments also •xtend ia time, covering continually greater,, intervals. Along , with .this extension in space and time the adjustment* also-increase, in specialty and complexity, passing through the various grades of brute life, and. prolonging themselves into the domain of reason! Very striking are ' JVIr Spencer's remarks regarding the influence of'the sense of] touch upon the, development .of. intel-, ligence; This is, sso to say, the ihothertongue. of all the senses, into which they must be translated to be of service to the organism. • • Hence it« importance. ■ The - parrot is ibe* most "intelligent of birds, and its tac.tual♦ power is also. greatest.. "From this seiise it gets _ knowledge ■unattainable birds which cannot employ their feet as hands. The elephant isthempst sagacious of quadrupeds —Its. tactual range and skill, and the consequent' multiplication of experiences; which; it owes to its wonderfully adaptable trunk, being the, basis ;pf.its sagacity*; animals, for a similar cause, are more sagacious than hoofed animals—atonement; being to^some extent made, in the case of the horse; by the possession of sensitive prehensile lips. In the Primates the evolution of intellect and the> evolution of tactual appendages go hand in hand. In the; most intelligent anthropoid -" apes we find the tactual range and delicacy greatly augmehte'd,^ new; avenues of knowledge being thus opened to the animal. Man crowns the; edifice here, not only in virtue of his own manipulatory power, but through the ■ enormous -extension of his range of experience, by the invention of .instruments of precision, which- serve as supplemental senses and supplemental limbs. • The reciprocal action of these is finely. described and illustrated. That chastened intellectual emotion t© which I have referred, -in connexion with Mr Darwin is; not m: Mr Spencerl His illustrations -possess at times exceeding vividness and force; and 1 from his style on such occasions it.is.to be inferred that the ganglia of this Apostle of the Understanding are sometimes the seat of a nascent poetic thrill,

It la a fact of supreme importance tliafc actions the performance of which at first requires even painful effort arid deliberation may by habit be rendered automatic. Witness the slow-learning of its letters by a child, and the subsequent facility of reading Jin? a nian, when each'group of letters which forms a word is instantly, and without effort,- fused to a single perception. Instance the billiard-player, whoae muscles of hand and eye, when he reaches the perfection of his art, are unconsciously coordinated. Instance themusician; who, by prftotic'e, i s eh able d to fuse a multitude of arrangements, auditory, tactual, and muscular, into aprocesß of automatic manipulation. Combining such facts with the doctrine of hereditary transmission, we reach a theory of Instinct. A chick, after coming out of the egg, balances itself correctly, runs about, picks up food, thus showing that it possesses a power of directing its movements to definite ends. . How did the chick learn this very complex coordination of the eye, muscles, and beak? It has Dot been individually taught; its personal experience is nil ; but it has the benefit of ancestral experience. -In its inherited organization are registered all the powers which ifc displays at birth. So also as regards the instinct of tho hive-bee, already referred to. The distance at

which the insects stand apart when they sweep their hemispheres and build their cells is ' organically remembered.' Man also carries with him the physical texture of his ancestry, as well as the inherited intellect bound up with it. The defers of intelligence during infancy and youth are probably le^s due to a Jack of individual experience than to the fact that in early life the cerebral organization is still incomplete. The period necessary for completion varies with the race and with the individual. As a round shot outstrips a rifled one on quitting the muzzle of the gun, so the lower race in childhood may outstrip the higher. But the higher eventually overtakes the lower, and surpasses it in range. As regards individuals, we do not always find the precocity of youth prolonged to mental power in maturity ; while the dulness^of boyhood is sometimes strikingly contrasted with the intellectual energy of i after years. Newton, when a boy, was weakly, and lie showed no particular aptitude at school; but in his eighteenth year he went to Cambridge, and soon afterwards astonished his teachers by his power of dealing with geometrical problems. During his quiet youta his brain was slowly preparing itself to be the organ of those energies which he subse-. quently displayed. By myriad blows (to use aLucretian phrase) the image and superscription of the external world are stamped as states, of consciousness upon the organism, the depth'of the impression depending upon the number of .the blows. When, two or more phenomena oGciir in the environment invariably together, they are stamped to the same depth or to the same relief, and indissolubly connected. And here we come to the threshold of-a great question. Seeing that he could in no way rid himself of the consciousness' of Space and Time, Kant assumed them to be necessary 'forms of intuition,' the moulds and shapes into which our intuitions are thrown, belonging to ourselvea solely and without objective existence. With unexpected power and success Mr Spencer brings the hereditary experience theory, as he holds it, to bear upon this question. 'If there exist certain external relations which are experienced by all organisms at all instants of their waking lives—relations which are absolutely constant and universal —there will be established answering internal relations that are absolutely constant and universal. Such relations we have in those of Space and Time. As the substratum of all other relations of, the Non-Ego, they must be responded to by conceptions that are- the the substrata of all other relations in the Ego. Being the constant and infinitely repeated elements of thought, they ncrast become the automatic elements of thought —the elements of thought which it is impossible to get rid of—the i" forms of intuition."

Throughout this, application and extension of the 'Law of Inseparable Association,' Mr Spender stands upon his own ground, invoking, instead of the experiences of the individual, the registered experiences of the race. His overthrow of the restriction of experience to the individual is, I think, complete. That restriction ignores the power of organizing experience furnished at the outset to each individual; it ignores tho different degrees of this power possessed by different races and by different individuals of the same race. Were there not in the human brain a, potency antecedent to all experience, a dog or cat ought to be as capable of education as a man. These predetermined internal relations are independent of the experiences of " the individual. The human brain is the ' organised register of infinitely numerous experiences received during the evolution :of life, or rather during the evolution of that series of organisms .through which the human organism has bpen reached. The effects of the most uniform and frequent of these experiences have been successively bequeathed, principal and interest and have slowly mounted to that highintelligpnce which lies latent in the brain of the infant. Thus it happens that j the European inherits from twenty to' thirty cubic inches more of brain than the Papuan. Thus, it happens that faculties, as of music, which scarcely exist in some inferior races, become congenital in : superior ones. rl hus it happens that out of savages unable to count up to the number of their fingers, and speaking a language containing only nouns, and verbs, arise at length our Newtons and Shakespeares.' 1 (To be continued J