TYNDALVS REPLY TO HIS CRITICS. 429 



abstract, constitute a sufficient ground for censure. There must have 

 been something in my particular mode of crossing it which provoked 

 this tremendous " chorus of dissent." 



Let us calmly reason the point out. I hold the nebular theory as 

 it was held by Kant, Laplace, and William Herschel, and as it is held 

 by the best scientific intellects of to-day. According to it, our sun and 

 planets were once diffused thixmgh space as an impalpable haze, out 

 of which, by condensation, came the solar system. What caused the 

 haze to condense ? Loss of heat. What rounded the sun and planets ? 

 That which rounds a tear molecular force. For aeons, the immensity 

 of which overwhelms man's conceptions, the earth was unfit to main- 

 tain what we call life. It is now covered with visible living things. 

 They are not formed of matter different from that of the earth around 

 them. They are, on the contrary, bone of its bone and flesh of its 

 flesh. How were they introduced ? Was life implicated in the nebulae 

 as part, it may be, of a vaster and wholly Incomprehensible Life ; or 

 is it the work of a Being standing: outside the nebulae, who fashioned it 

 as a potter does his clay, but whose own origin and ways are equally 

 past finding out ? As far as the eye of science has hitherto ranged 

 through Nature, no intrusion of purely creative power into any series 

 of phenomena has ever been observed. The assumption* of such a 

 power to account for special phenomena has always proved a failure. 

 It is opposed to the very spirit of science, and I therefore assumed the 

 responsibility of holding up in contrast with it that method of Nature 

 which it has been the vocation and triumph of science to disclose, and 

 in the application of which we can alone hope for further light. Hold- 

 ing, then, that the nebulae and all subsequent life stand to each other 

 in the relation of the germ to the finished organism, I reaffirm here, 

 not arrogantly, or defiantly, but without a shade of indistinctness, the 

 position laid do,wn in Belfast. 



Not with the vagueness belonging to the emotions, but with the 

 definiteness belonging to the understanding, the scientific man has to 

 put to himself these questions regarding the introduction of life upon 

 the earth. He will be the last to dogmatize upon the subject, for he 

 knows best that certainty is here for the present unattainable. His 

 refusal of the creative hypothesis is less an assertion of knowledge 

 than a protest against the assumption of knowledge which must long, 

 if not forever, lie beyond us, and the claim to which is the source of 

 manifold confusion upon earth. With a mind open to conviction, he 

 asks his opponents to show him an authority for the belief they so 

 strenuously and so fiercely uphold. They can do no more than point to 

 the Book of Genesis, or some other portion of the Bible. Profoundly 

 interesting and indeed pathetic to me are those attempts of the open- 

 ing mind of man to appease its hunger for a Cause. But the Book of 

 Genesis has no voice in scientific questions. To the grasp of geology, 

 which it resisted for a time, it at length yielded like potter's clay ; its 



