278 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



The burden of my writings in this connection is as much a recognition 

 of the weakness of science as an assertion of its strength. In 1867 I 

 told the working-men of Dundee that while making the largest demand 

 for freedom of investigation ; while considering science to be alike 

 powerful as an instrument of intellectual culture, and as a ministrant 

 to the material wants of men — 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. I compare the mind of man to a musical in- 

 strument with a certain range of notes, beyond which in both directions 

 exists infinite silence. The phenomena of matter and force come with- 

 in our intellectual range ; but behind, and above, and around us, the 

 real mystery of the universe lies unsolved, and, as far as we are con- 

 cerned, is incapable of solution. 



While refreshing my mind on these old themes I am struck by the 

 poverty of my own thought ; appearing to myself as a person possess- 

 ing one idea, which so overmasters him that he is never weary of re- 

 peating it. That idea is the polar conception of the grandeur and the 

 littleness of man — the vastness of his range in some respects and direc- 

 tions, and his powerlessness to take a single step in others. In 1868, 

 before the mathematical and physical section of the British Association, 

 then assembled at Norwich, I repeat the same well-worn note : 



" In aflBrming the growth of the human body to be mechanical, and thought as 

 exercised by us to have its correlative in the physics of the brain, the position 

 of the ' materialist,' as far as that position is tenable, is stated. I think the 

 materialist will be able finally to maintain this position against all attacks, buls 

 I do not think he can pass beyond it. The problem of the connection of body 

 and soul is as insoluble in its modern form as it was in the prescientific ages. 

 Phosphorus is a constituent of the human brain, and a trenchant German writer 

 has exclaimed, 'Ohne Phospor kein Gedanke! ' That may or may not be the 

 case ; but, even if we knew it to be the case, the knowledge would not lighten 

 our darkness. On both sides of the zone here assigned to the materialist, he is 

 equally helpless. If you ask him whence is this 'matter,' of which we have 

 been discoursing — who or what divided it into molecules, and impressed upon 

 them this necessity of running into organic forms — he has no answer. Science 

 is also mute in regard to such questions. But if the materialist is confounded, 

 and Science is rendered dumb, who else is prepared with an answer ? Let us 

 lower our heads and acknowledge our ignorance, priest and philosopher, one 

 and all." 



The roll of echoes which succeeded the lecture delivered by Prof. 

 Virchow at Munich on September 32, 1877, was long and loud. The 

 Times published a nearly full translation of the lecture, and it was 

 eagerly commented on in other journals. Glances from it to an ad- 

 dress delivered by me before the Midland Institute last autumn were 

 very frequent. Prof. Virchow was held up to me in some quarters as a 

 model of philosophic caution, who by his reasonableness reproved my 

 rashness and by his depth reproved my shallowness. With true theo- 

 logic courtesy I was sedulously emptied not only of "the principles of 



