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truth ” which is not entire, seems profane to those who occupy themselves 
seriously with the deeper problems of our being. 
In considering the book of the Professor in the preceding address, it was felt 
that the principal interest of the audience would probably be concentrated on 
the second chapter of that book, on Prayer and Natural Law. But the task 
imposed on the lecturer was the review of the teachings of the Professor’s 
volume as a whole, which precluded the possibility of entering into much 
detail as to any part of it. To indicate the animus, to exhibit the pervading 
tone, and in some sense detect the moral object of the work, was a more 
arduous task than to point out the illogical character of certain parts ; and 
it was all that was possible within the assigned limits. Enough was said, it 
is hoped, to conviet the erroneous hypotheses and fragmentary assumptions 
of the Professor’s essays, so far as they touched philosophy or religion. As 
the paragraphs of the address are numbered, it will be sufficient to 
refer to them, and not quote them, in the following remarks, which are 
intended to show to all experimental physicists, that neither on moral 
nor religious questions can they accept Professor Tyndall’s guidance without 
giving up reason as well as religion. We shall thus supply, in some measure, 
a defence of prayer as the habit of the Christian life, which Professor 
Tyndall and others have ventured so unscientifically to challenge. 
Let it at once be noted that, as to all the first principles of his reasonings, the 
Professor has the greatest inconsistency : the results of which must be pointed 
out. He states that the whole stock of energy in the world consists of attrac- 
tions, repulsions, and motions ( Section 7). He rejects as an absurdity all 
“ direct personal volition ” as affecting this world ; and here he so expresses 
himself as to deny alike the will of God and of man ( Section 8). He then 
illustrates his view by two anecdotes, in which he despises two Roman 
Catholic clergymen for using prayers for God’s blessing on the fruits of the 
earth, and for favourable mountain weather, as though they expected a 
miracle ; while he admits that they did not, and does not see that he ought 
to have suspected that he had misapprehended their “ theory of prayer.” 
Instead of this, he only ridicules them for going contrary to his own theory 
(, Section 9, 10.) 
After this general view of the universe — this explanation of what the 
“ whole stock of energy ” in the known rerum natura consists of, and this 
exclusion of all will or “ volition,” to make his theory complete, he somewhat 
contradictorily admits that, after all, the molecular groupings and molecular 
motions which were the whole “ energy ” in the world, “ explain nothing ! ” 
He even descends from his lofty-seeming terminology to speak of this 
world- wide stock of “ energy” as a series of “ pushes” and “pulls,” without 
any cause. Now here, at least, was a hiatus in his system, where “volition,” 
one would think, might supply a want ; and had he been a philosopher, 
instead of ail experimentalist only, he would not have hesitated at once to 
suspend his theory that there was no possible place, except in the imagina- 
tion of a “ savage,” for the supposition of volition “ in the economy of 
nature.” ( Sections 12, 13.) Professor Tyndall, of course, admits that there 
