The Period from 1861 to 1870 15 



have been made, aJl combine to render the obloquy and scorn with which they have been 

 received in many quarters peculiarly unjust and in bad taste. It should also be said of 

 Mr. Darwin that his views on the origin of species are not inconsistent with his own 

 acceptance of the doctrine of Revelation ; and that many of our best men of science 

 look upon his theory as not incompatible with the religious faith which is the guide of 

 their lives, and their hope for the future. To these men it seems presumption that any 

 mere man should restrict the Deity in His manner of vitalizing and beautifying the 

 earth. To them it is a proof of higher wisdom and greater power in the Creator that 

 He should endow the vital principle with such potency that, pervaded by it, all the 

 economy of nature, in both the animal and vegetable worlds, should be so nicely self- 

 adjusting that, like a perfect machine from the hands of a master maker, it requires no 

 constant tinkering to preserve the constancy and regularity of its movements. 



F. A. P. Barnard (astronomy, physics), president of the Association for 

 the meeting at Buffalo in August, 1866, delivered his address as retiring 

 president at the meeting in Chicago in August, 1868. This address ranged 

 widely over the then recent advances in the physical sciences — astronomy 

 and celestial mechanics, electromagnetic phenomena, electrochemistry, solar 

 parallax, the planetoids, the distance of Sirius, eclipses of the sun, sunspots, 

 meteors, comets, glaciation, coal deposits in China, chemistry, the conserva- 

 tion of energy- — and, finally, the speaker examined the properties of living 

 organisms, including the activities of the mind, in the light of the physical 

 laws he had discussed. A few paragraphs, all of which are well written and 

 not one of which is dull, will illustrate the tenor of the address (vol. 17, pp. 

 57-101): 



The philosophy therefore which makes thought a form of force, makes thought a 

 mode of motion ; converts the thinking being into a mechanical automaton, whose 

 sensations, emotions, intellections, are mere vibrations produced in its material sub- 

 stance by the play of physical forces, and whose conscious existence must forever cease 

 when the exhausted organism shall at length fail to respond to these external im- 

 pulses. If the law of conservation of force is therefore to be extended to mental phe- 

 nomena, the immortality of the soul can be no longer maintained. On this hypothesis 

 indeed man has no soul. Life is but a momentary phenomenon, a casual condition of 

 matter, to be classed with combustion, incandescence, sound, odor, anything most acci- 

 dental and evanescent. More than this, the living being, while his brief consciousness 

 endures, is the mere sport of forces foreign to himself. His conscious freedom of will 

 is nothing but an illusion. His thoughts, his feelings, his acts, are all links in a chain 

 of inevitable events, determined by unalterable physical laws. He ceases to be a moral 

 agent or an accountable being. Let it be observed moreover that the doctrine of neces- 

 sity here forced upon us, differs from that which has been inculcated by necessitarian 

 philosophers heretofore. The necessity which fetters the will by making it the slave of 

 motive, is one in which the coercion is moral and not physical ; and which leaves us 

 room at least to respect poor human nature though we may compassionate. That which 

 presents will and motive together as two modes of motion, of which the first is but the 

 second under a new form, is a necessity of which the slave has lost even respectability, 

 and is reduced to the humble level of a piece of mechanism. 



But it is not because of these consequences that I reject a doctrine so derogatory to 



