Note 35 — Chapter IX

The feebleness and vacillation of Dr. Tyndall's whole views of things, as soon as they bear on matters that are of any universal moment, is so typical of the entire positive thought of the day, that I may with advantage give one or two further illustrations of it. Although in one place he proclaims loudly that the emergence of consciousness from matter must ever remain a mystery, he yet shows indication of a hope that it may yet be solved. He quotes with approval, and with an implication that he himself leans to the view expressed in them, the following words of Ueberweg, whom he calls 'one of the subtlest heads that Germany has produced.' 'What happens in the brain, says Ueberweg, 'would in my opinion not be possible if the process which here appears in its greatest concentration, did not obtain generally, only in a vastly diminished degree. Take a pair of mice, and a cask of flour. By copious nourishment the animals increase and multiply, and in the same proportion sensations and feelings augment. The quantity of these preserved by the first pair is not simply diffused among their descendants, for in that case the last would feel more fully than the first. The sensations and the feelings must necessarily be referred back to the flour, where they exist, weak and pale, it is true, and not concentrated, as in the brain.' 'We may not,' Dr. Tyndall adds, by way of a gloss to this, 'be able to taste or smell alcohol in a tub of fermented cherries, but by distillation we obtain from them concentrated Kirschwasser. Hence Ueberweg's comparison of the brain to a still, which concentrates the sensation and feeling pre-existing, but diluted, in the food.'

Let us now compare this with the following. 'It is no explanation,' says Dr. Tyndall, 'to say that objective and subjective are two sides of one and the same phenomenon. Why should phenomena have two sides? There are plenty of molecular motions which do not exhibit this two-sidedness. Does water think or feel when it runs into frost-ferns upon a window pane? If not, why should the molecular motions of the brain be yoked to this mysterious companion consciousness?'

Here we have two views, diametrically opposed to each other, the one suggested with approval, and the other implied as his own, by the same writer, and in the same short essay. The first view is that consciousness is the general property of all matter, just as motion is. The second view is that consciousness is not the general property of matter, but the inexplicable property of the brain only.

Here again we have a similar inconsistency. Upon one page Dr. Tyndall says that when we have 'exhausted physics, and reached its very rim, a mighty Mystery stills looms beyond us. We have made no step towards its solution. And thus it will ever loom.' And on the opposite page he says thus: 'If asked whether science has solved, or is likely in our day to solve, the problem of the universe, I must shake my head in doubt.'

Further, I will remind the reader of Dr. Tyndall's arguments, on one occasion, against any outside builder or creator of the material universe. He argued that such did not exist, because his supposed action was not definitely presentable. 'I should enquire after its shape,' he says:—'Has it legs or arms? If not, I would wish it to be made clear to me how a thing without these appliances can act so perfectly the part of a builder? He challenged the theist (the theist addressed at the time was Dr. Martineau) to give him some account of his God's workings; and 'When he does this,' said Dr. Tyndall, 'I shall "demand of him an immediate exercise" of the power "of definite mental presentation."' If he fails here, Dr. Tyndall argues, his case is at once disproved; for nothing exists that is not thus presentable. Let us compare this with his dealing with the fact of consciousness. Consciousness, he admits, is not thus presentable; and yet consciousness, he admits, exists.

Instances might be multiplied of the same vacillation and confusion of thought—the same feminine inability to be constant to one train of reasoning. But those just given suffice. What weight can we attach to a man's philosophy, who after telling us that consciousness may possibly be an inherent property of matter, of which 'the receit of reason is a limbec only,' adds in the same breath almost, that matter generally is certainly not conscious, and that consciousness comes to the brain we know not whence nor wherefore? What shall we say of a man who in one sentence tells us that it is impossible that science can ever solve the riddle of things, and tells us in the next sentence that it is doubtful if this impossibility will be accomplished within the next fifty years?—who argues that God is a mystery, and therefore God is a fiction; who admits that consciousness is a fact, and yet proclaims that it is a mystery; and who says that the fact of matter producing consciousness being a mystery, proves the mystery of consciousness acting on matter to be a fact?