THE VITAL ORDER 



reflected in nature or that reads its own thoughts 

 and emotions into nature. In a few eminent ex- 

 amples the two types of mind to which I refer seem 

 more or less blended. Sir Oliver Lodge is a case in 

 point. Sir Oliver is an eminent physicist who in his 

 conception of the totality of things is yet a thor- 

 oughgoing idealist and mystic. His solution of the 

 problem of living things is extra-scientific. He sees 

 in life a distinct transcendental principle, not in- 

 volved in the constitution of matter, but independ- 

 ent of it, entering into it and using it for its own pur- 

 poses. 



Tyndall was another great scientist with an in- 

 born idealistic strain in him. His famous, and to 

 many minds disquieting, declaration, made in his 

 Belfast address over thirty years ago, that in matter 

 itself he saw the promise and the potency of all 

 terrestrial life, stamps him as a scientific materialist. 

 But his conception of matter, as "at bottom essen- 

 tially mystical and transcendental," stamps him as 

 also an idealist. The idealist in him speaks very 

 eloquently in the passage which, in the same ad- 

 dress, he puts into the mouth of Bishop Butler, in 

 the latter 's imaginary debate with Lucretius: "Your 

 atoms," says the Bishop, "are individually without 

 sensation, much more are they without intelli- 

 gence. May I ask you, then, to try your hand upon 

 this problem. Take your dead hydrogen atoms, 

 your dead oxygen atoms, your dead carbon atoms, 

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