5<D2 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



view of the nature of the surround- 

 ing world. And it well illustrates the 

 three phases of opinion to which we 

 have referred, for there was first a long 

 unanimity of ignorance, then a stormy 

 and obnoxious conflict, and this has led 

 to a new and more intelligent basis of 

 agreement. But, while there is a vir- 

 tual accord among our writers as to 

 the doctrine itself, they disagree radi- 

 cally as to its interpretations, and show 

 us that there must be a good deal of 

 warm work yet before old beliefs are 

 brought into consistency with the new 

 theory. The writer in the Penn Month- 

 ly refuses to modify his notions about 

 breaks and new beginnings in the order 

 of things. He says : " If there be one 

 word more intolerable than another to 

 science, it is beginning. To disprove 

 supposed beginnings, to show that they 

 were the outcome of what went before, j 

 is the scientist's vocation. The cate- 

 gory of cause and effect becomes, 

 through long practice, his first law of 

 thought, the groove of all his mental 

 operations. With whatever fact he is 

 brought face to face, his first impulse is 

 to apply that category ' to account for 

 the fact,' as he calls the process. And 

 when he speaks of causes he comes to 

 mean only secondary causes, those that 

 are themselves effects. On the other 

 hand, this word beginning seems to us 

 to embrace in it all that the metaphy- 

 sician, the theist, and the Christian, 

 have to fight for against the natural- 

 ist." But this conception of the gov- 

 ernment of the world, "all that the 

 theist and the Christian have to fight 

 for," the writer in Blackwood regards 

 as a very derogatory view of the di- 

 vine working. He says of scientific men : 

 "It is impossible for them, or for any, 

 to conceive too grandly of Nature, or of 

 the unbroken harmony and continuity 

 of its movements. The very magnifi- 

 cence of its order is only a further il- 

 lustration of Divine wisdom ; for surely 

 the very thought of a Divine mind im- 

 plies the perfection of wisdom, or, in 



other words, of order, as its expresssion. 

 The more, therefore, the order of Na- 

 ture is explained, and its sequences seem 

 to run into one another with unbroken 

 continuity, only the more and not the 

 less loftily will we be able to measure 

 the working of the Divine mind." 



Again, these writers come into sharp 

 collision over the question of the atom- 

 ic theory. There has been much com- 

 plaint that Prof. Tyndall did not take 

 up for discussion some special sci- 

 entific topic which he had made his 

 own ; yet he did exactly this thing. 

 His discourse is a monograph on that 

 part of physical philosophy which he 

 has been compelled during all his 

 scientific life to study, that is, the evi- 

 dence and import of the doctrine of 

 the atomic or molecular constitution of 

 matter. This is a problem which scien- 

 tific men cannot evade : they are driven 

 to it by the very exigencies of mental 

 action ; as Dr. McCosh well observes : 

 " We seem to be obliged by a sort of 

 necessity of thought or speech to fall 

 back on some such conception. If 

 every thing we see in the world be 

 composite, and capable of analysis and 

 division, we have to think and talk of 

 something indivisible and undecom- 

 posable, which we may call particles, 

 molecules, or atoms." But if the idea 

 is thus fundamental and deals with the 

 very essence and core of scientific 

 philosophy, Prof. Tyndall certainly 

 did not go out of his sphere in con- 

 sidering it. And though he is con- 

 demned, there appears to be no com- 

 mon ground for censure. His critics 

 are as much at variance with each 

 other as they are with him. The 

 writer in the Penn Monthly attacks the 

 atomic theory at the outset as if it were 

 some sort of a religious enemy which 

 must be got out of the way; and he 

 scouts it as an unprovable hypothesis, 

 bad metaphysics, and which explains 

 nothing. On the other hand, the writer 

 in Blackwood declares it to be "a per- 

 fectly valid theory, resting on its own 



