Does Tyndall deny this distinction? Apparently not. He not only makes Bishop Butler declare, with unanswerable power, that materialism can never show any connection between molecular processes and the phenomena of consciousness, but he distinctly iterates this in his own person at the end of the address; asserting that there is no fusion possible between the two classes of facts, those of sensation and those of consciousness. Professor Tyndall, then, in the famous sentence above quoted, does not declare himself a materialist in the only sense in which the term has hitherto been used. He does not pretend that sensation, thought, emotion, and will are reducible, in the last analysis, to solidity, extension, divisibility, etc.; he positively and absolutely denies this.
When Tyndall, therefore, asserts that he discerns in matter the promise and potency of every form and quality of life, he uses the word "matter" in a new sense. He does not mean by it the underlying subject of sensible phenomena. It is not the matter which we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell. What is it then? It is something beyond the limits of observation and experiment; for he says that in order to discover it we must "prolong the vision backward across the boundary of the experimental evidence." In short, it is something which we know nothing about. It is a conjecture, an opinion, a theoretical matter. In another place he calls this imaginary substance "a cosmical life." This something, which shall be the common basis of the phenomena of sense and soul, not only is not known, but apparently is not knowable. For he assures us that the very attempt to understand this cosmical life which makes the connection between physical and mental phenomena, is "to soar in a vacuum," or "to try to lift one's self by his own waistband."
Of course, then, the contents of the famous sentence are not science. It is not the great scientist, the profound observer of nature, the distinguished experimentalist, who speaks to us in that sentence, but one who is theorizing, as we all have a right to theorize. We also, if we choose, may imagine some "cosmical life" behind both matter and soul, as the common origin of both, and call this life spirit. We shall then be thinking of exactly the same substance that Tyndall is thinking of, only we give it another name. He has merely given another name to the great Being behind all the phenomena of body and soul, out of which or whom all proceed. But to give another name to a fact is not to tell us anything more about it. All meaning having evaporated from the word "matter," the sentence loses its whole significance, and it appears that the alarming declaration asserts nothing at all! In "abandoning all disguise" Tyndall has run little risk, for our analysis shows that he has not asserted anything except, perhaps, this, that there is, in his judgment, some unknown common basis in which matter and mind both inhere. This assertion is not alarming nor dangerous, for it is only what has always been believed.
As there is no materialism, in any known sense of that term, in the doctrine of this address, so likewise there is no atheism. In fact, in this same sentence Tyndall speaks of the "creator" of what he likes to call "matter" or "cosmical life." He objects strongly to a creator who works mechanically, and he seems to reprove Darwin for admitting an original or primordial form, created at first by the Deity. "The anthropomorphism, which it seemed the object of Mr. Darwin to set aside, is as firmly associated with the creation of a few forms as with the creation of a multitude." In another passage he says: "Is there not a temptation to close to some extent with Lucretius, when he affirms that nature is seen to do all things spontaneously of herself without the meddling of the gods?". But this last sentence shows a singular vacillation in so clear a thinker as Tyndall. How can one close "to some extent" with such a statement as that of Lucretius? Either the gods meddle, or they do not meddle. They can hardly be considered as meddling "to some extent." In still another passage he contrasts the doctrine of evolution with the usual doctrine of creation, rejecting the last in favor of the other, because creation makes of God "an artificer, fashioned after the human model, and acting by broken efforts, as man is seen to act."
All these expressions are somewhat vague, implying, as it seems, a certain obscurity in Tyndall's own thought. But it is not atheism. His "cosmical life" probably is exactly what Cudworth means by "plastic life." It is well known that Cudworth, whose great work is a confutation of all atheism, himself admits what he calls "a plastic nature" in the universe as a subordinate instrument of divine Providence. Just as Tyndall objects to regarding the Deity as "an artificer," Cudworth objects to the "mechanic theists," who make the Deity act directly upon matter from without, by separate efforts, instead of pouring a creative and arranging life into nature. We can easily see that Cudworth, like Tyndall, would object to Darwin's one or two "primordial germs." His "plastic nature" is working everywhere and always, though under a divine guidance. It is "a life," and therefore incorporeal. It is an unconscious life, which acts, not knowingly, but fatally. Man, according to Cudworth, partakes of this life from the life of the universe, just as he partakes of heat and cold from the heat and cold of the universe. Thus Cudworth, believing in some such "cosmical life" as Tyndall imagines, conceives it as being itself the organ and instrument of the Deity. Tyndall, therefore, though less clear in his statements than Cudworth, is not logically involved in atheism by those statements, unless we implicate in the same condemnation the writer whose vast work constitutes the fullest arsenal of weapons against all the forms of atheism.
Unfortunately, however, Tyndall does not come to any clearness on this point, which in one possessing such a lucidity of intellect must be occasioned by his leaving his own domain of science and venturing into this metaphysical world, with which he is not so familiar. His acquaintance with the history of these studies seems not to be extensive. For example, he attributes to Herbert Spencer, as if he were the discoverer, what both Hobbes and Descartes had already stated, that there is no necessary resemblance between our sensations and the external objects from which they are derived. In regard to a belief in God, he tells us that in his weaker moments he loses it, or that it becomes clouded and dim, but that when he is at his best he accepts it most fully. This belief, therefore, is not with Tyndall a matter of conviction, founded on reason, but a question of moods. No wonder, then, that he relegates religion to the region of sentiment, and declares that it has nothing to do with knowledge. It must not touch any question of cosmogony, or, if it does, must "submit to the control of science" in that field. But what has science to do with cosmogony? Science rests on observation of facts; but our professor tells us that he obtains his great cosmological idea of "a cosmical life" by prolonging his vision backward "across the boundary of the experimental evidence." Such science as this, which is based on no experience, and is incapable of verification, has hardly the right to warn religious belief away from any field.
Tyndall seems a little astray in making creation and evolution contradictory and incompatible. Evolution, he tells us, is the manifestation of a power wholly inscrutable to the intellect of man. We know that God is,—that is, we know it in our better moods,—but what God is, we cannot ever know. At all events we must not consider him as a Creator. "Two courses," says Tyndall, "and only two, are possible. Either let us open our doors freely to the conception of creative acts, or, abandoning them, let us radically change our notions of matter." His objections to the idea of a Creator appear to be (1) that it is "derived, not from the study of Nature, but from the observation of men;" and (2) that it represents the Deity "as an artificer, fashioned after a human model, and acting by broken efforts as man is seen to act."
Are these objections sound? When we study man, are we not then also studying Nature? Is not man himself the highest manifestation of Nature? If so, and if we see the quality of any power best in its highest and fullest operations, we can study the nature of God best by looking into our own. We should, in fact, know very little of Nature if we did not look within as well as without. Tyndall justly demands unlimited freedom of investigation in the pursuit of science. But whence came this very idea of freedom except from the human mind? Nothing in the external world is free; all is fatal. Such ideas as cause, force, substance, law, unity, ideality, are not observed in the outward world—they are given by the activity of the mind itself. Subtract these from our thought, and we should know very little of Nature or its origin.
No doubt the idea of a Creator, and of one perfect in wisdom, power, and goodness, is derived by man from his own mind. But it is not necessary that such a Creator should be an "artificer," or proceed by "broken efforts." He may act by evolution, or processes of development. He may create perpetually, by a life flowing from himself into all things. He may create the universe anew at every moment—not as a man lights a torch with a match and then goes away, but as the sun creates his image in the water by a perpetual process. Thus God may be regarded as creating each animal and each plant, while he maintains the mysterious force of development by which it grows from its egg or its seed. The essential idea of creation is an infinite cause, acting according to a perfect intelligence, for a perfect good. There is nothing, necessarily, of an artificer or of broken efforts in this. It is the very idea of divine creation given in the New Testament. "From whom, and through whom, and to whom, are all things." "In him, we live, and move, and have our being." The theist may well accept the view given by Goethe, in his little poem, "Gott, Gemüth, und Welt."
"What kind of God would He be who only pushes the universe from without?
Who lets the All of Things run round and round on his finger?
It becomes him far better to move the universe from within,
To take Nature up into Himself, to let Himself down into Nature,
So that whatever lives, and moves, and has its being in Him
Never loses His power, never misses His spirit."