X THE BELFAST ADDRESS JOHN TYNDALL [John Tyndall (1820-1893) holds a position of great fame and importance in the field of investigative science. In his youth he was largely self-educated, and held early positions as surveyor, engineer, and teacher of mathematics. His advanced studies were pursued at Marburg, where he worked with tremendous energy, but under straitened financial circumstances. Tyndall's general note probably dated from the period of the publication of his Glaciers of the Alps, 1857-1859, which represented the results of an investigative excursion to Switzerland in company with Huxley. From this time on, he rapidly gained popularity as a writer and lecturer on scientific topics. It is a mistake, however, to regard Tyndall as merely a popularizer of science, for his investigations, which were both extensive and minute, are numbered among the most important contributions of his century to geological, chemical, meteorological, and physical science. The so-called Belfast Address was delivered as Tyndall's inaugural address at the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Belfast in 1874, and was published in the Popular Science Monthly in the same year. This address, an imposing reminder that science and literary art are not inevitably unrelated, reviews the history of ancient and modern efforts to develop an explanation of physical and spiritual existence from the evidence of scientific observation, as opposed to the assumptions of religious tradition. As a frank challenge to the adherents of a literal interpretation of biblical tradition, the Belfast Address brought down upon Tyndall the full blast of polemical fire that had been smoldering angrily since 1859, when the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species first brought forward conclusive justification for the free criticism of dogmatic theology. Tyndall's position in this controversy may be found in his Fragments of Science.] An impulse inherent in primeval man turned his thoughts and questionings betimes toward 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 a species of human creatures, perhaps raised from among mankind, and retaining all human passions and appetites," 1 were handed over the rule and governance of natural phe 1 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 effects 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 1 Hume, Natural History of Religion. 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 super- to 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,1 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 the 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 excellent friend Mr. Spedding, the learned editor and biographer of Bacon. It is evident, indeed, that Bacon considered Democritus to be a man of weightier metal than either Plato or Aristotle, though their philosophy "was noised and celebrated in the schools, amid the din and pomp of professors." It was not they, but Genseric and Attila and the barbarians, who destroyed the 1 Born 460 B.C. atomic philosophy. "For at a time when all human learning had suffered shipwreck, these planks of Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy, as being of a lighter and more inflated substance, were preserved and come down to us, while things more solid sank and almost passed into oblivion." The principles enunciated by Democritus reveal his uncompromising antagonism to those who deduced the phenomena of nature from the caprices of the gods. They are briefly these: 1. From nothing comes nothing. Nothing that exists can be destroyed. All changes are due to the combination and separation of molecules. 2. Nothing happens by chance. Every occurrence has its cause from which it follows by necessity. 3. The only existing things are the atoms and empty space; all else is mere opinion. 4. The atoms are infinite in number, and infinitely various in form; they strike together, and the lateral motions and whirlings which thus arise are the beginnings of worlds. 5. The varieties of all things depend upon the varieties of their atoms, in number, size, and aggregation. 6. The soul consists of free, smooth, round atoms, like those of fire. These are the most mobile of all. They interpenetrate the whole body, and in their motions the phenomena of life arise. Thus the atoms of Democritus are individually without sensation; they combine in obedience to mechanical laws; and not only organic forms, but the phenomena of sensation and thought, are also the result of their combination. That great enigma, "the exquisite adaptation of one part of an organism to another part, and to the conditions of life," more especially the construction of the human body, Democritus made no attempt to solve. Empedocles, a man of more fiery and poetic nature, introduced the notion of love and hate among the atoms to account for their combination and separation. Noticing this gap in the doctrine of Democritus, he struck in with the penetrating thought, linked, however, with some wild speculation, that it lay in the very nature of those combinations which were suited to their ends (in other words, in harmony with their environment) to maintain themselves, while unfit combina tions, having no proper habitat, must rapidly disappear. Thus more than 2000 years ago the doctrine of the "survival of the fittest," which in our day, not on the basis of vague conjecture, but of positive knowledge, has been raised to such extraordinary significance, had received at all events partial enunciation.1 Epicurus, said to be the son of a poor schoolmaster at Samos, is the next dominant figure in the history of the atomic philosophy. He mastered the writings of Democritus, heard lectures in Athens, returned to Samos, and subsequently wandered through various countries. He finally returned to Athens, where he bought a garden, and surrounded himself by pupils, in the midst of whom he lived a pure and serene life, and died a peaceful death. His philosophy was almost identical with that of Democritus; but he never quoted either friend or foe. One main object of Epicurus was to free the world from superstition and the fear of death. Death he treated with indifference. It merely robs us of sensation. As long as we are, death is not; and when death is, we are not. Life has no more evil for him who has made up his mind that it is no evil not to live. He adored the gods, but not in the ordinary fashion. The idea of divine power, properly purified, he thought an elevating one. Still he taught, "Not he is godless who rejects the gods of the crowd, but rather he who accepts them." The gods were to him eternal and immortal beings, whose blessedness excluded every thought of care or occupation of any kind. Nature pursues her course in accordance with everlasting laws, the gods never interfering. They haunt The lucid interspace of world and world Where never creeps a cloud or moves a wind, 1 Lange, History of Materialism, 2d edit., p. 23. Tennyson's Lucretius. |