Essays on the use and limit of the imagination in science

by John Tyndall

Here, too, we question whether Sir William Thomson will be content with this definition of the process by which he has been guided to his most recent advance in molecular physics. In the splendid series of inductions verified step after step by rigorous experiment and observation, and kept in exactest continuity by the chain of mathematical evolution, is imagination the faculty to which are to be given the chief honours of this conquest of a new realm of physics? This would surely be to force upon us a new and arbitrary classification or analysis of the powers of the intellect. If we follow Professor Tyndall himself through the masterly train of reasoning whereby he leads us to the laws of reflection and transmission of light as the cause of the azure of the firmament, is what we admire the leap of imagination, or the firmly balanced and duly graduated tread of a mind trained in the discipline of logic, and careful to plant every step on the assured ground of fact or experience? It is simply a misnomer to apply the name of imagination to the process or the faculty to which this onward march into the realm of unexplored nature is really due. As well describe as a triumph of the imagination the connected and organized plan of the great strategist which has drawn round Paris a living cordon of 300,000 men.

From a Lecture addressed to Teachers at the South Kensington Museum, April 30, 1861, by J. TYNDALL.

Here, then, is an exhibition of power which we can call forth or cause to disappear at pleasure. We magnetize our strip of steel by drawing it along the pole of a magnet; we can demagnetize it, or reverse its magnetism, by properly drawing it along the same pole in the opposite direction. What, then, is the real nature of this wondrous change? What is it that takes place among the atoms of the steel when the substance is magnetized? The question leads us beyond the region of sense, and into that of imagination. This faculty, indeed, is the divining rod of the man of science. Not, however, an imagination which catches its creations from the air, but one informed and inspired by facts, capable of seizing firmly on a physical image as a principle, of discerning its consequences, and of devising means whereby these forecasts of thought may be brought to an experimental test. If such a principle be adequate to account for all the phenomena, if from an assumed cause the observed facts necessarily follow, we call the assumption a theory, and once possessing it, we can not only revive at pleasure facts already known, but we can predict others which we have never seen. Thus, then, in the prosecution of physical science, our powers of observation, memory, imagination, and inference, are all drawn upon. We observe facts and store them up; imagination broods upon these memories, and by the aid of reason tries to discern their interdependence. The theoretic principle flashes, or slowly dawns upon the mind, and then the deductive faculty interposes to carry out the principle to its logical consequences. A perfect theory gives dominion over natural facts; and even an assumption which can only partially stand the test of a comparison with facts, may be of eminent use in enabling us to connect and classify groups of phenomena.

From the GUARDIAN, Sept. 21, 1870.

He held some pieces of paper in his hand, but he rarely referred to them. Thoroughly possessed by his subject, his thoughts seemed to flow forth with perfect ease, fresh minted as they were in the most appropriate and perspicuous words. He led his hearers gently and almost unconsciously through the most perplexed mazes and subtlest passages of thought, keeping their ears enchained and their fancy charmed by the endless succession of apt metaphor; and yet, whenever he felt or fancied that their overstrained attention began to flag, he was able to turn aside into light and pleasant banter, and after this interlude of welcome refreshment, to resume again with renewed power the unbroken thread of his serious discourse. It was the manifest work of a master in his art, handling with ease and grace the weighty tools which long use had made familiar to his hand.

From the ENGLISH CHURCHMAN, Sept. 29, 1870.

What astonishes us beyond measure is, that a man of Professor Tyndall’s real ability and earnestness should sneer at the second verse of the Bible, and speak of it as a legend! Why, surely, he has here the very thing which he is searching—the true origin of life. When chaos ruled over the world, and the earth was void of life; it was the Divine Spirit that breathed over the lifeless mass, and light and life sprang into existence. Without stopping to point out the evidence of the highest Christian doctrine in this passage, we have at least the solution of the enigma of the origin of life, in the revealed truth that it was caused by the Creative Spirit.

From the RECORD, Sept. 23, 1870.

Discovery of Motives, No. I.—But why did Professor Tyndall make such an appeal to the imagination of his hearers? His imaginary picture of the occult operations of light was introduced as a plea for the wildness of such weaker brethren, as he calls Mr. Darwin, in speaking of his theory of natural selection, succeeded by his supplementary theory of pangenesis. It is objected to Mr. Darwin’s theories by Christian philosophers that these theories are essentially atheistic. That they are framed for the express purpose of blotting out of the page of nature some of the most marvellous evidences of design—of the most patent revelations of the book of nature, that there is an all-wise, all-mighty Creator, God. That these theories deprive man of all those prerogatives that raise him above the brute. That the facts of nature contradict them. The first theory of Mr. Darwin, that of natural selection, is an attempt to account for the formation of all animal and vegetable beings from an hypothetical germ.... Even this does not pall the imagination of Professor Tyndall. He accepts the theory of the avowed atheist Louis Buchner, in his ‘Force and Matter,’ that the theory of evolution requires us to imagine not only that all the structures, animal and vegetable, were once potentially present in the fire-mist of the nebulous theory, but also that all mental powers—Plato, Shakespeare, Newton, and Raphael—are potential in the fires of the sun.

Professor Tyndall appeals to believers in the Bible as God’s Word not to style such a theory wicked or impious. He says men can hold it, and manifest in their lives what he terms so-called Christian virtues. He says, ‘They who keep such questions open and will not tolerate any unlawful limitation of the horizon of their souls, have as little fellowship with the atheist who says there is no God, as with the theist who professes to know the mind of God.’ These men then are theists, but what kind of a God does their free speculation require? The theists who are sneered at by Professor Tyndall, who believe in a God who has revealed his will and his mind to man, have far higher and more convincing proofs that He has so revealed Himself than Professor Tyndall can ever accumulate for his belief in the undulatory theory of light.