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faith, is fitted to elevate practical morality and to deliver social 
life for ever from its strifes and hatreds. All these positions 
except one had been asserted or implied in Prof. Tyndall's 
previous deliverances. The only advanced position which he 
takes in this discourse is the very familiar dogma of Hobbes, 
which has been transfigured by Herbert Spencer, that moral 
distinctions are created or evolved from social relations and 
are sanctioned by social forces. “ But if this is all that is new 
in this address, why notice it at all ? We have had enough of 
all this at Belfast and on other occasions, and the staple of such 
reasoning has been so often used that it is becoming somewhat 
threadbare." But this does not follow. Prof. Tyndall never 
repeats himself. If his logic is in principle unchanged, the form 
in which it is presented always varies. Every time he rises to 
argue on these extra-physical themes, he adduces what he 
considers new facts, and employs fresh and novel illustrations. 
He invariably aims to strengthen the most familiar and oftenest 
used chain of argument by some links freshly forged. More- 
over, he is sensitively alive to what the men of these times are 
thinking of ; so sensitively, that he cannot rest content with 
old arguments, if new ones are required. He is too ingenuous 
not to confess, or at least not to betray, his sense of the weak- 
ness of some of the positions which he had previously taken, 
and too ingenious not to attempt to strengthen them. The 
occasional discourses of so sensitive and frank a thinker as he, 
are also in a sort the outspeaking of what is going on in the 
minds of scores and hundreds of men who want the honesty or 
the opportunity to speak their minds as freely as he speaks for 
them. What is more to the purpose, they declare the secret 
misgivings and the more than half-formed creed of multitudes 
of younger men who know not how to answer the reasons of 
an argument from the conclusions of which they shrink. 
These are the reasons why we think it worth while to subject 
this eloquent discourse to a careful examination. We shall do 
this with the same frankness which our excellent friend, the 
author, always exhibits, and wo hope with equal fidelity to the 
scientific spirit by which he is animated. 
We observe before the argument begins, a little skirmishing, 
the design of which is not at first view very obvious. In 
speaking of the dependence of the individual upon the forces 
of the past, Prof. Tyndall says that Boyle regarded the uni- 
verse as a machine, but Mr. Carlyle prefers to regard it as a 
tree, and adds : “ A machine may be defined as an organism 
with life and direction outside, a tree may bo defined as an 
organism with life and direction within." This language seems 
novel. Can a machine be an organism, — and an organism with 
