THE LATE PROFESSOR TYNDALL. 821 



ive imagination. He so presented his problems as to exercise 

 their powers of investigation. He did not, like most teachers, 

 make his pupils mere passive recipients, but made them active 

 explorers. 



As these facts imply, Prof. Tyndall's thoughts were not limited 

 to physics and allied sciences, but passed into psychology ; and 

 though this was not one of his topics, it was a subject of interest 

 to him. Led as he was to make excursions into the science of 

 mind, he was led also into that indeterminate region through which 

 this science passes into the science of being ; if we can call that a 

 science of which the issue is nescience. He was much more con- 

 scious than physicists usually are that every physical inquiry, 

 pursued to the end, brings us down to metaphysics, and leaves us 

 face to face with an insoluble problem. Sundry propositions 

 which physicists include as lying within their domain do not be- 

 long to physics at all, but are concerned with our cognitions of 

 matter and force : a fact clearly shown by the controversy at pres- 

 ent going on about the fundamentals of dynamics. But in him 

 the consciousness that there here exists a door which, though 

 open, science can not pass through, if not always present, was 

 ever ready to emerge. Not improbably his early familiarity 

 with theological questions given him by the controversy between 

 Catholicism and Protestantism, which occupied his mind much 

 during youth, may have had to do with this. But whatever its 

 cause, the fact, as proved by various spoken and written words, 

 was a belief that the known is surrounded by an unknown, which 

 he recognized as something more than a negation. Men of science 

 may be divided into two classes, of which the one, well exemplified 

 in Faraday, keeping their science and their religion absolutely 

 separate, are untroubled by any incongruities between them ; and 

 the other of which, occupying themselves exclusively with the 

 facts of science, never ask what implications they have. Be it 

 trilobite or be it double-star, their thought about it is much like 

 the thought of Peter Bell about the primrose. Tyndall did not 

 belong to either class; and of the last I have heard him speak 

 with implied scorn. 



Being thus not simply a specialist but in considerable measure 

 a generalist, willingly giving some attention to the organic sci- 

 ences, if not largely acquainted with them, and awake to " the 

 humanities," if not in the collegiate sense, yet in a wider sense 

 Tyndall was an interesting companion ; beneficially interesting to 

 those with brains in a normal state, but to me injuriously interest- 

 ing, as being too exciting. Twice I had experience of this. When, 

 after an injury received while bathing in a Swiss mountain- 

 stream, he was laid up for some time, and, on getting back to 

 England, remained at Folkestone, I went down to spend a few days 



