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character, will sufficiently indicate this. Still there is no doubt that the 
controversy between faith and unbelief has now reached a special kind of 
crisis, which Lord O’Neill’s paper this evening intimates. Men of high 
intelligence, like Professors Huxley and Tyndall, are, of course, aware that 
the secret of life and primary motion actually lies beyond science. The 
acknowledgment is made, in sufficiently mystified terms at times, but it is 
made. Thus Professor Tyndall says : — “ Divorced from matter, where is 
‘life’ to be found?” as if he ignored the whole region of thought ), — 
forgetting for the moment that Professor Huxley’s “ protoplasm ” is quite 
dead, or “ divorced from life” as he might express it, and therefore life 
exnts somewhere beyond the protoplasm. Again, he says, “the animal 
body distributes, but it cannot create ” ; availing himself of the here some- 
what ambiguous and invidious term ‘ ‘ create ” ; for what he calls “ distri- 
buting ” is, in truth, the originating of a new form of motion. And also 
when he so speaks of an “animal body,” or “ the animal body,” he does not 
mean a dead animal, but a living one ; and it had been better, therefore, to 
say so, and frankly admit, that the “ life ” is what makes the distinction. A 
truthf tl philosophy shrinks from all needless ambiguity. 
I would point out, once more — (for it is far from the first time), — that the 
defenders of truth are not unfrequently ensnared, in the use of abstractions 
furnished by their opponents. As one example of this, a sentence may be 
given, as quoted by our paper to-night. The animal body, — sect. 4 (i.e., the 
live body), — “ has a power of unlocking at pleasure the potential energy 
stored up in the nerves,” — which, in the language of common sense, just 
means, that a living body sometimes acts, and always lives. With a similar 
ambitiousness of phrase, Dr. Tyndall says that the “ principle of conserva- 
tion of energy in .Nature leaves no nook or crevice for spontaneity to mingle 
with the necessary play of natural force,” — a mere truism ; while, on the 
other hand, the great Cambridge writers of the Unseen Universe maintain 
that “ force is a name for nothing,” and that the word “ force ” had better 
be dropped, there being “no such thing” ! — Unseen Universe, 4th edition, 
p. 104. Under which circumstances even Professor Tyndall would be at a 
loss to “ distribute ” force, or give it its natural “ play.” 
This principle of the “ conservation of energy,” which has found such 
ostentatious expression of late, really implies very little more than we used 
to mean by the “ uniformity of Nature” (as the Psalm says it, “ He hath given 
them a law which cannot be broken ”). This “ energy,” or “ life in itself,” 
as the Pentateuch puts it, being an original constituent of the physical 
universe in certain departments, is singularly imagined by Professor Tyndall 
to be a difficulty in the way of Theistical interference ; the fact being that 
it is really a part of the Theistical hypothesis of creation. It reconciles 
what might seem mechanical with what we perceive to be vital phenomena. 
It may even be part of the “ uniformity of Nature ” that it has non- 
uniform action dispersed largely, and eluding precise detection. Certainly 
it does not preclude independent causation from without, — though the 
suggested exclusion of “ force ” would imply that. 
