Essays on the use and limit of the imagination in science / by John Tyndall.

  • Tyndall, John, 1820-1893.
Date:
1870
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Essays on the use and limit of the imagination in science / by John Tyndall. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    tain this position against all attacks; but I do not think, in the present condition of the human mind, that he can pass beyond this position. I do not think he is entitled to say that his molecular groupings and his molecular motions explain everything. In reahty they explain nothing. The utmost he can affirm is the association of two classes of phenomena, of whose real bond of union he is in absolute ignorance. The problem of the connexion of body and soul is as insoluble in its modern form as it was in the prescientific ages. Phosphorus is known to enter into the composition of the human brain, and a trenchant German writer has exclaimed, ‘ Ohne Phosphor, kein Gedanke.’ That may or may not be the case ; but even if we knew it to be the case, the knowledge would not lighten our darkness. On both sides of the zone here assigned to the materialist he is equally helpless. If you ask him whence is this ‘ Matter ’ of which we have been discoursing, who or what divided it into molecules, who or what impressed upon them this necessity of running into organic forms, he has no answer. Science is mute in reply to these questions. But if the materialist is confounded and science rendered dumb, who else is prepared with a solution ? To whom has this arm of the Lord been revealed? Let us lower our heads and ac- knowdedge our ignorance, priest and philosopher, one and all. Perhaps the mystery may resolve itself into know- ledge at some future day. The process of things upon this earth has been one of amelioration. It is a long way from the Iguanodon and his contemporaries to the Pre- sident and Members of the British Association. And whether we regard the improvement from the scientific or from the theological point of viewq as the result of pro- gressive development, or as the result of successive exhi- bitions of creative enei-gy, neither view entitles us to