Thoughts on Causality. 229 



believe, there is nothing which can be reached by real 

 knowledge ; though we are compelled to recognize a pro- 

 found and mysterious reality to which our ethical feelings 

 are coordinated. It is unfair to hurl at Professor Tyndall 

 the charge of atheism in the philosophic sense. He dis- 

 tinctly repels the imputation. It is uncandid, after his 

 careful qualifications, to charge him with materialism in 

 that ordinary sense which excludes the notion of Deity 

 back of matter. When he avows materialism, he means 

 that within the region of the data of science, he discovers 

 everything originating from antecedents under the recog- 

 nized laws of matter and force. There certainly is some- 

 thing, he says, behind matter and force ; but he follows 

 Spencer in refusing to subscribe to any predicates respecting 

 it. He is hardly a material Pantheist, for he distinctly 

 declares that sensation and thought cannot come from dead 

 matter ; and implies that though existence emerges from 

 matter, its ground is further back. He certainly belongs 

 to the nescience school of theists, in which Hamilton and 

 Mansel are older masters than Spencer; and there seems 

 little propriety and less occasion for his assuming the burden 

 of a confession so opprobious as materialism. 



I desire to make the analysis of this address the occasion 

 for shaping a statement of fundamental principles which 

 ought to regulate the procedures of scientist, philosopher 

 and theologian alike. We are all equally attempting to 

 cleave through the dense darkness which environs us, to 

 reach the truth of things. That we live in a universe of 

 phenomena is generally admitted. We are therefore real- 

 ities, and we all act on the assumption that there are other 

 realities shadowed forth in the realm of appearances. No 

 reasoning, nevertheless, can prove the existence of an ex- 

 ternal world ; and the history of thought shows that it is 

 possible, in individual cases, to stifle the universal belief 

 that it exists. But if these phenomena represent realities, 



