Sophisms. 99 



another : " Who will set limits to the possible 

 play of Professor Tyndall's scientific imagina- 

 tion ?" Why should a cooling planet be so much 

 more likely to produce minute organisms, and to 

 develope " organic forms," than a cooling flask ? 

 Or, as Dr. Bastian pertinently puts it, " If such 

 synthetic processes took place then, why should 

 they not take place now ? Why should the 

 inherent molecular properties of various kinds of 

 matter have undergone so much alteration ? " l 



The opening sentences of the Belfast Address 

 are vitiated by a fallacy which reappears in 

 other places with the regularity of a recurring 

 decimal. "An impulse inherent in primeval 

 man," says Dr. Tyndall, "turned his thoughts 

 and questionings betimes towards the sources 

 of natural phenomena. The same impulse, in- 

 herited and intensified, is the spur of scientific 

 action to-day. Determined by it, by a process 

 of abstraction from experience we form physical 

 theories which lie beyond the pale of experience, 

 but which satisfy the desire of the mind to see 

 every natural occurrence resting upon a cause." 



Now, since of this " primeval man " nothing 

 whatever is known, on what ground can it be 

 affirmed that he possessed the "inherent im- 

 pulse " here attributed to him ? All that is 

 1 u Beginnings of Life," Pref. p. x. 



