posed between the molecules of the brain, and influencing the transference of motion among the molecules. The thing eludes all mental presentation. But,' he adds, "the production of consciousness ‘the by molecular motion is to me quite as unpresentable to the mental vision, as the production of molecular motion by consciousness. If I reject one result I reject both. I, however,' and here Dr. Tyndall rises to his highest pitch of sublimity, with all the adjuncts of capitals and italics, I, however, reject neither, and thus stand in the presence of two Incomprehensibles, instead of one Incomprehensible.'

Now what does all this mean? There is one meaning of which the words are capable, which would make them perfectly clear and coherent; but that meaning, as we shall see presently, cannot possibly be Dr. Tyndall's. They would be perfectly clear and coherent if he meant this-that the brain was a natural instrument, in the hands of a supernatural player; but that why the instrument should be able. to be played upon, and how the player should be able to play on it, were both matters on which he could throw no light. But elsewhere he tells us expressly that he does not mean this. This, he expressly says, is the interpretation of grosser minds,' which science will not for a moment permit us to retain. The brain contains no entity,' usually occupied, we know not how, among its molecules,' but separable from them. This, he tells us, is a heathen' notion, and until we abandon it, no approach to the subject is possible.' What does he mean then, when he tells us he rejects' neither result,' when he tells us that he believes that molecular motion produces consciousness, and also that consciousness in its turn again produces molecular motion? when he tells us distinctly of these two, that 'observation proves them to interact'? If such language as this means anything, it must have reference to two distinct forces, one material and the other immaterial. Indeed, does he not himself say so? Does he not tell us that one of the beliefs he does not reject is the belief in states of consciousness interposed between the molecules of the brain, and influencing the transference of motion among the molecules'? It is clear, then, that these states are not molecules -in other words, they are not material. But if not material, what are they, acting on matter, and yet distinct from matter? What can they belong to, but that heathen' thing the soul-that entity, which could be thrown out of the window,' which Dr. Tyndall says elsewhere, science forbids us to believe in? Surely, for an exact thinker, this is thought in a strange confusion. He has spiritualised materialism by an enlarged definition of matter; he has defined it as that mysterious something' by which all that is is accomplished, and yet here we find him, in the face of this, declaring his belief in some second mystery as well. And for what reason? This is the strangest thing of all. He believes in the second Incomprehensible, because he believes in the first Incomprehensible. 'If I reject one,'

he says, 'I must reject both. I, however, reject neither.' But why? Because one undoubted fact is a mystery, is every mystery an undoubted fact? Such is Dr. Tyndall's logic in this remarkable utterance; and if this logic be valid, we can at once prove to him the truth of the Christian Trinity, and a variety of other heathen' doctrines also. But it is evident that, if applied in this way, such an argument would fail to move him. No one could be so quick as he to detect the futility of it. What shall we say of him then, when he applies it in his own way? We can say simply this—that his mind, for the time being, is in a state of such confusion that he is incapable really of clearly meaning anything. What his position logically must be, what in other moments he avows it to be, is plain enough. It is essentially that of a man confronted by one Incomprehensible only, not confronted by two. But, looked at in certain ways, or rather looked from in certain ways, this position seems to stagger him. The problem of existence reels and grows dim before him; and he fancies he detects the presence of his two Incomprehensibles, when he has really only seen one Incomprehensible double. If this be not his case, it must be one that, intellectually, is even weaker than this. It must be that, not of a man with a single coherent theory, which his intellect in its less vigorous moments sometimes relaxes its hold upon; but it must be that of a man with two hostile theories, which he vainly imagines to be one, and which he inculcates alternately, each with an equal emphasis.

This bewilderment I impute to Dr. Tyndall is so important and so characteristic of the whole school he belongs to, that I must pause a moment longer to illustrate its reality, no matter to what cause we attribute it to his vacillation between two theories, or his intermittent grasp of one.

Although he has proclaimed so loudly that the emergence of consciousness from matter must for ever remain a mystery, he yet shows indications of a hope that it may still be solved. He thus quotes. with approval, and with an implication that he leans himself to the view expressed in them, the following words of Ueberweg, whom he calls one of the subtlest heads that Germany has produced.'

What happens in the brain (says Ueberweg) would, in my opinion, not be possible, if the process which here appears in its greatest concentration did not obtain generally, only in a vastly diminished degree. Take a pair of mice and a cask of flour. By copious nourishment the animals increase and multiply, and in the same proportion sensations and feelings augment. The quantity of these latter possessed by the first pair is not simply diffused among their descendants, for in that case the last would feel more feebly than the first. The sensations and the feelings must necessarily be referred back to the flour, where they exist, weak and pale it is true, and not concentrated, as in the brain.

'We may not,' Dr. Tyndall adds by way of a gloss to this, 'be

able to taste or smell alcohol in a tub of fermented cherries, but by distillation we obtain from them concentrated Kirschwasser. Hence Ueberweg's comparison of the brain to a still, which concentrates the sensation and feeling pre-existing, but diluted, in the food."'

Let us now compare this with the following. It is no explanation,' says Dr. Tyndall, 'to say that objective and subjective are two sides of one and the same phenomenon. Why should phenomena have two sides? There are plenty of molecular motions which do not exhibit this two-sidedness. Does water think or feel when it runs into frost ferns upon a window pane? If not, why should the molecular motions of the brain be yoked to this mysterious companion consciousness?"

Here we have two views, diametrically opposed to each other, the one suggested with approval, and the other implied as his own, by the same writer, and in the same short essay. The first view is that consciousness is the general property of all matter, just as motion is. The second view is that consciousness is not the general property of matter, but the inexplicable property of the brain only.

Here again we have a similar inconsistency. Upon one page Dr. Tyndall says that when we have exhausted physics, and reached its very rim, a mighty Mystery still looms beyond us. We have made no step towards its solution. And thus it will ever loom.' And on the opposite page he says this: 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.'

Further, I will remind the reader of Dr. Tyndall's arguments, some time since, against any outside designer or creator of the material universe. He argued that such did not exist, because his supposed action was not definitely presentable. He challenged the theist (the theist addressed at the time was Dr. Martineau) to give him some account of his God's workings; and 'When he does this,' said Dr. Tyndall, I shall "demand of him an immediate exercise of the power" of definite mental presentation." If he fails here, his case is at once disproved; for nothing exists that is not thus presentable.' Let us compare this with his dealing with the fact of consciousness. Consciousness, he admits, is not thus presentable; and yet consciousness, he admits, exists.

Instances might be multiplied of the same vacillation and confusion of thought-the same inability to be constant to one train of reasoning. But those just given suffice. What weight can we attach to a man's philosophy, who after telling us that consciousness may possibly be an inherent property of matter, of which the receipt of reason is a limbeck only,' adds, in the same breath almost, that matter generally is certainly not conscious, and that consciousness comes to the brain we know not whence nor wherefore? What shall we say of a man who in one sentence tells us that it is impossible

that science can ever solve the problem of life, and in the next sentence that it is doubtful if this impossibility will be accomplished within the next fifty years?-who argues that God is a mystery, and therefore God is a fiction; who admits that consciousness is a fact, and yet proclaims that it is a mystery; and who says that the fact of matter producing consciousness being a mystery proves the mystery of consciousness acting on matter to be a fact?

But it would be in the highest degree untrue to suppose that Dr. Tyndall and his school have not, through all this, a distinct logical meaning, if they could only see it clearly, and only resolve to stand by it. They have such a meaning-a very plain and significant one; and whenever they forget its significance, they do not mince matters in proclaiming it. They have the makings, in fact, among their doctrines (it may plausibly be contended) of a coherent theory of the universe. But this theory is one which they shrink from looking fully in the face; and they try to persuade themselves that it is something other than it is. The theory in question is one of a univeral automatism, and involves an absolute denial of will. If our physicists accept this, they are entirely logical, and their conclusion stands firmly on their premisses, whether these latter be equally firm or no. Dr. Tyndall is right in saying that 'an iron strength seems to belong to the logic which claims for the brain an automatic action uninfluenced by consciousness.' The production of consciousness as a bye-product may, as he says, be incomprehensible; still he admits that it is a fact; and by postulating the second incomprehensible, he simplifies and explains nothing; on the contrary, from his own point of view he confuses everything. As far as the needs of science go, this second incomprehensible is an entirely gratuitous hypothesis, and, as far as the logic of science goes, an entirely inadmissible one.

6

Why then does Dr. Tyndall introduce it? Why, having so often told us that all that is is matter, does he then flourish in our face a something that is not material? Why, having rejected' an' outside builder' of the world, does he thus come back to us with an outside orderer of the brain? He would probably tell us that he does not do so, or that he does not mean to do so. And we may well believe him. The fault is, he does not know what he means. I will try to show him.

3 Is I say, it may be contended plausibly, because even this much is by no means certain. It is by no means certain, for instance, that motion may legitimately be included among the inherent properties of matter. This question, however, is far too large to be even touched on here. I can only remind the reader that our modern physicists may find that their facile manufacture of enlarged definitions of matter involves a number of difficulties and questions of whose very existence they are apparently unaware, and which their whole training has left them incapable of appreciating. For the present, however, I provisionally take their whole position for granted.

First, he means something with which, as I have said, we may all agree. He means that matter moving under certain laws (which may possibly be part and parcel of its own essence) combines of itself after many changes into the human brain, every motion of which has some connection with consciousness, and corresponds to some state of it. And this fact is a mystery; though it may be questioned if it be more mysterious why matter should think of itself than why it should move of itself. At any rate, thus far we are all agreed; and whatever mystery we may be dealing with, it is one, as I have said, that leaves us in ignorance, but not in doubt. The doubt comes in in the next step. We have then not to wonder at one fact, but to choose between two hypotheses. In either case the mystery is the same. The two hypotheses are these: Does consciousness emerge from the brain, or does it in any degree impregnate it from elsewhere? Is the brain a twig from which a leaf emerges, or is it a twig on which a bird alights?

This is the real question which Dr. Tyndall is in doubt about, and indeed the only question. Are there two orders of things, or is there only one? And when he tells us that he is no dogmatist, that the question of the universe is too much for him, and that he stands dumb before it in a reverent and appreciative wonder, he only means that he will answer this question neither in one way nor another. He will neither maintain that there is one order of things only, and abide by that; nor maintain that there are two orders of things, and abide by that. Now the question to ask him, and the whole agnostic school, is this: Why are they in this state of suspense? There is an iron strength in the logic,' as Dr. Tyndall himself says, that rejects altogether the second order. The hypothesis of its existence. explains no fact of observation. The scheme of nature, if it cannot be wholly explained without it, can, at any rate, be explained better without it than with it. From the stand-point of the thinker who holds that all that is is matter, it seems a thing too superfluous, too unmeaning, to be even worth denial. And yet our modern agnostics will not deny it; and the name agnostic, that they are so proud of, means simply that they will not. Now why is this? Why this emphatic protestation on the part of our positive thinkers that there may exist a something, utterly unneeded by their system, and destructive of its completeness?

The answer is plain. Though their system does not need it, the moral value of life does. As to that value, they have certain foregone conclusions, which they cannot resolve to abandon, but which their system can make no room for. Two alternatives are offered themto admit that life has not the meaning they thought it had, or that their system has not the completeness they thought it had and of these two alternatives they will accept neither. Let us consider the position. Here is the kind of question Dr. Tyndall and his school