THE EEGINNINGS OF THINGS; OR, SCIENCE versus THEOLOGY. AN ADDRESS BY PROF. TYNDALL, BEFORE THE 267 BRITISH ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE, August 19, 1874. [REPRINTED FROM THE LONDON TIMES.] BOSTON: PUBLISHED BY JOSIAH P. MENDUM. gift THE BEGINNINGS OF THINGS. AN impulse inherent in primeval man turned my thoughts and questionings betimes towards the sources of natural phenomena. The same impulse, inherited and intensified, is the spur of scientific action to-day. Determined by it, by a process of abstraction from experience, we form physical theories which lie beyond the pale of experience, but which satisfy the desire of the mind to see every natural occurrence resting upon a cause. In forming their notions of the origin of things, our earliest historic (and, doubtless we might add, our prehistoric) ancestors pursued, as far as their intelligence permitted, the same course. They also fell back upon experience, but with this difference that the particular experiences which furnished the weft and woof of their theories were drawn, not from the study of Nature, but from what lay much closer to them, the observation of men. Their theories, accordingly, took an anthropomorphic form. To supersensual beings, which," however potent and invisible, were nothing but species of human creatures, perhaps raised from among mankind, and retaining all human passions and appetites," were handed over the rule and governance of natural phe 12-7-53 (RECAP) Irving 5091 nomena. Tested by observation and reflection, these early notions failed in the long run to satisfy the more penetrating intellects of our race. Far in the depths of history we find men of exceptional power differentiating themselves from the crowd, rejecting these anthropomorphic notions, and seeking to connect natural phenomena with their physical principles. But long prior to these purer efforts of the understanding the merchant had been abroad, and rendered the philosopher possible; commerce had been developed, wealth amassed, leisure for travel and for speculation secured, while races educated under different conditions, and therefore differently informed and endowed, had been stimulated and sharpened by mutual contact. In those regions where the commercial aristocracy of ancient Greece mingled with its Eastern neighbors, the sciences were born, being nurtured and developed by free-thinking and courageous men. The state of things to be displaced may be gathered from a passage of Euripides quoted by Hume: "There is nothing in the world; no glory, no prosperity. The gods toss all into confusion, mix everything with its reverse, that all of us, from our ignorance and uncertainty, may pay them the more worship and reverence." Now, as science demands the radical extirpation of caprice and the absolute reliance upon law in Nature, there grew with the growth of scientific notions a desire and determination to sweep from the field of theory this mob of gods and demons, and to place natural phenomena on a basis more congruent with themselves. The problem which had been previously approached from above, was now attacked from below; theoretic effort passed from the superto the sub-sensible. It was felt that to construct the universe in idea it was necessary to have some notion of its constituent parts of what Lucretius subsequently called the "First Beginnings." Abstracting again from experience, the leaders of scientific speculation reached at length the pregnant doctrine of atoms and molecules, the latest developments of which were set forth with such power and clearness at the last meeting of the British Association. Thought no doubt had long hovered about this doctrine before it attained the precision and completeness which it assumed in the mind of Democritus, a philosopher who may well for a moment arrest our attention. "Few great men," says Lange, in his excellent History of Materialism, a work to the spirit and letter of which I am equally indebted, "have been so despitefully used by history as Democritus. In the distorted images sent down to us through unscientific traditions there remains of him almost nothing but the name of "the laughing philosopher," while figures of immeasurably smaller significance spread themselves at full length before us." Lange speaks of Bacon's high appreciation of Democritus — for ample illustrations of which I am indebted to my excel |