THE RELATIONS BETWEEN SCIENCE AND RELIGION, ETC. 271 



met anyone who does." " If/' he says, " we are true to the canons of 

 science, we must deny to subjective phenomena all influence on 

 physical processes." " We have here," he proceeds, " to deal v/ith 

 facts almost as difficult to be seized mentally as the idea of a 

 soul. And if you are content to make your ' soul ' a poetic 

 rendering of a phenomenon which refuses the yoke of ordinary 

 physical laws, I, for one, would not object to this exercise of 

 ideality." In other words, on the basis oT an assumed purely 

 physical causation, the Professor ridicules the notion that the 

 hypothesis of a human soul can afford any explanation of the 

 typical merchant's movements. " On the same ground," he 

 adds, "the anthropomorphic notion of a creative Architect, 

 endowed with manlike powers of indefinite magnitude, is to be 

 regarded with consideration. It marks a phase of theoretic 

 activity which the human race could not escape, and our 

 present objection to such a notion rests upon its incongruity 

 with our knowledge." The reviewer passes some very just 

 censures upon the impropriety of this use of a scientific lecture 

 to disparage religious beliefs, and exposes the absurdity of the 

 Professor's position. "Professor Tyndall, on a platform at 

 Birmingham, condescending, ' for one,' to allow the human race 

 to talk about their souls, affords a picture which is not sur- 

 passed in the Bunciad!' " The Soul," the reviewer proceeds, 

 " is the rendering, whether poetic or not, of those lofty faculties 

 which are the organs of truth, of beauty, of goodness ; which 

 are the home of faith, of hope and of love ; in which the 

 aspiration and the conviction of immortality are enshrined, 

 and which are capable of trampling upon all physical sensa- 

 tions, whether of pleasure or of pain. Collect the passages in 

 literature, sacred or profane, in which the word ' Soul ' is used, 

 and you will have collected a Treasury of the loftiest emotions 

 and the noblest thoughts which have animated human nature. 

 In the presence of such recollections, we refrain from character- 

 ising as it deserves the request that we should be content to 

 treat the soul as the poetic rendering of a phenomenon which 

 is not intelligible to Professor Tyndall." 



This example is perhaps an extreme one, but it illustrates 

 clearly the hard physical standards by which even 

 eminent men of science of that day measured human thought 

 and religion. Professor Huxley, indeed, endeavoured to 

 mitigate the rigidity of this conception by protesting against 

 " the fallacy that the laws of Nature are agents, instead of 

 being, as they really are, a mere record of experience, upon 

 which we base our interpretations of that which does happen. 



