1894. TYNDALL. 17 



control, and relinquish all thought of controlling it." If a dis- 

 tinguished prelate were to stand up before the British Association 

 to-day, and say that recent theories on the sequence of Plutonic rocks 

 did not agree with the order of the strata assigned to the Holy City 

 in Revelations, and were therefore unorthodox, and therefore neces- 

 sarily wrong, he would be laughed at. But when Bishop Wilberforce 

 denounced Darwinism in 1857 this sort of argument was valid, and 

 had to be replied to. The fact that the same is not the case now, is 

 no doubt largely due to the Agnostic crusade of Professor Tyndall. 

 It is now universally recognised that in all matters of natural 

 phenomena and physical energy, Science is the iinal court of appeal, 

 and that if religion teaches differently so much the worse for religion ; 

 the very reference to prayer as a form of physical energy, which was 

 accepted 40 years back, now sounds irreverent, so great has been the 

 progress. 



During the course of this fight Tyndall made for himself many 

 foes, in addition to those such as Forbes, Tait, and Ericson, whose 

 enmity he had aroused during the course of his scientific work. Thus 

 his series of papers on prayer and miracles, and his proposal to 

 test the former by a series of laboratory experiments on a large scale, 

 roused the fighting section of the Church. When Oxford gave him 

 the degree of D.C.L., it was in face of the protest of some of the 

 " old school." It was doubtless to the same cause that he owed the 

 caricature of him that appeared in " The New Paul and Virginia," 

 where as " The Professor " he appears as the vulgarest and coarsest 

 of the creations of Mr. Mallock's usually subtle spite. 



A second belief which Tyndall has largely helped to impress upon 

 the public mind, is that the value of scientific education is not the 

 dissemination of a mere catalogue of facts, but of more precise 

 methods of thought. As he put it, " science should be studied not 

 as a branch of education, but as a means of education ; " we are there- 

 fore bound to carry the scientific method into every department of 

 thought, and work, and life, and to carry every argument to its 

 logical conclusion, let them clash with whatever cherished beliefs they 

 may. When Tyndall returned to England from Germany this was 

 not the current method of thought. Men worked at science, but feared 

 its conclusions; it was the date when, as Tyndall has put it, there 

 were " Tories even in science who regard Imagination as a faculty to 

 be feared and avoided, rather than employed." There were men like 

 P"araday who seemed to belong to a kind of " Manchester School " in 

 science, who worked at science all the week, and preached Sande- 

 manianism on Sundays : they divided their brains into two water- 

 tight compartments, and put their reason in one, and their religion in 

 another, and trusted 10 habit, fashion, and indolence to keep the bulk- 

 head impervious. But Tyndall had no sympathy with this school of 

 thought : he belie\ed that, on the other hand, " science has of late 

 years assumed a momentous position in the world. Both in a material, 



c 



