“21st June.
“My dear Miss Cobbe,
“I would do anything I could for your sake and irrespectively of the interest of your subject.
“Had I Faraday’s own letter, I could decipher at once what he meant, for I was intimately acquainted with his course of thought during the later years of his life. It would however be running a great risk to attempt to supply this hiatus without seeing his letter.
“I should think it refers to the influence of time on magnetic action. About the date referred to he was speculating and trying to prove experimentally whether magnetism required time to pass through space.
“Always yours faithfully,
“John Tyndall.”
In a letter of mine to a friend written after meeting Prof. Tyndall at dinner at Edgbaston during the Congress of the British Association in Birmingham, after mentioning M. Vambéry and some others, I said; “The one I liked best was Prof. Tyndall, with whom I had quite an ‘awful’ talk alone about the bearing of Science on Religion. He said in words like a fine poem, that Knowledge seemed to him ‘like an instrument on which we went up, note after note, and octave after octave; but at last there came a note which our ears could not hear, and which was silent for us. And at the other end of the scale there was another silent note.’”
Many years after this, there appeared an article in the Pall Mall Gazette which I felt sure was by Prof. Tyndall, in which it was calmly stated that the scientific intellect had settled the controversy between Pantheism and Theism, and that the said Scientific Intellect “permitted us to believe in an order of Development,” and would “allow the religious instincts and the language of Religion to gather round that idea;” but that the notion of a “Great Director” can by no means be suffered by the same Scientific Intellect.
I wrote a reply, begging to be informed when and where the controversy between Pantheism and Theism had been settled, as the statement, dropped so coolly in a single paragraph, was, to say the least, startling; and I concluded by saying, “We may be driven into the howling wilderness of a Godless world by the fiery swords of these new Cherubim of Knowledge; but at least we will not shrink away into it before their innuendoes!”