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The “Rights of Matter”1

“I know what you’re thinking about,” said Tweedledum; “but it isn’t so, nohow.”
“Contrariwise,” continued Tweedledee, “if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.”
— Lewis Carroll: Through the Looking-Glass

During the early summer of 1874, Robertson Smith toured widely in Germany, returning to London in mid-August by way of Holland and Belgium, before setting out for the British Association meeting in Belfast. Writing to Black on his arrival in Ireland, he observed:

Here I am enjoying myself very much and find everyone most kind. But it is high time I were back to work.
I don’t think I have got much news to give you of a definite kind and I don’t feel up to writing a history of my journey [through Germany] in full. Tyndall’s lecture was wretched and I pitch into some points of it today in the Northern Whig. I’ll see if I can send you a copy.2

This was the second and last occasion on which Smith attended the annual conference of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Maxwell had been President in 1873 and had delivered a state of the art address on atomic theory.3 On this occasion, it was John Tyndall who occupied the Presidential chair, while P.G. Tait, normally an enthusiastic participant at all B.A. meetings, was conspicuous by his absence. Relations between T´ and T´´ had been deteriorating rapidly since 1871, when tensions arose over the alleged defamation of J.D. Forbes by Tyndall and the mutual acrimony was intensified with the publication of the latter’s book, The Forms of Water, in 1874, in which (so Tait convinced himself) Tyndall had falsely credited Louis Agassiz with discovering the true nature of glacial flow.

Tyndall’s turn

The whole issue is discussed exhaustively but inconclusively by the respective biographers of Tait, Forbes and Tyndall.4 In 1841, Forbes had stayed in Switzerland as a guest of Agassiz and had pointed out to the latter the characteristic vertical stratification of the glacier ice. Both men undertook entirely independent measurements of the glacial flow, reaching similar conclusions more or less simultaneously. Separate publication of their findings, in Edinburgh and Paris respectively, took place in July and August, 1841, Forbes having apparently beaten Agassiz by a matter of weeks after a much more cursory though accurate investigation. Tait had given no credit whatsoever to Agassiz’ work in his contribution to Forbes’ biography5 and, in seeking to redress this imbalance, John Tyndall had further incurred the wrath of an already irascible opponent.

Like Alexander Bain, Tyndall had reached eminence without benefit of birth or privilege. Having been born in very modest circumstances, his early endeavours bear in certain respects a striking resemblance to those of his Aberdeen contemporary:

Tyndall was a true son of the nineteenth century’s passion for self-help and improvement. Born in relative poverty in an obscure Irish village, he became one of the most respected figures in London at the height of her cultural splendour. Denied the advantages of a university education until nearly thirty, he made himself the acknowledged peer of the leading scientists, philosophers and literary figures of his age.6

After some years as a railway surveyor during the rail development boom of the 1840s, Tyndall embarked on mathematics teaching before travelling to Germany to study under the eminent chemist Robert Bunsen and subsequently the physicist Hermann Knobloch at Marburg University. Thereafter, he moved to Berlin, where he became friendly with Rudolf Clausius, one of the early targets of Tait’s venom. On his return to England in 1851, Tyndall began to make himself widely known through public lecturing and in 1853 was elected Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Royal Institution, eventually succeeding Faraday as Superintendent there. As we have seen already, his immense popularity as a scientific lecturer undoubtedly incurred Tait’s jealousy7 but the latter’s more overt attack was focused upon Tyndall’s materialism. Even so, it is hard at this distance in time to comprehend the intense antipathy between Tait and Tyndall, which reached its height in the exchange of letters in Nature during 1873. Tyndall was certainly prone to an over-enthusiastic preoccupation with diverse areas of scientific research regarded by others as their own particular preserves8 but this was by no means untypical of the Victorian polymath – as Robertson Smith’s story itself so clearly exemplifies.

Three of Tyndall’s scientific interests especially posed a threat. As a proponent of the germ theory of infectious disease,9 he demonstrated conclusively that abiogenesis – spontaneous generation – did not occur in sterile circumstances.10 In doing so, Tyndall took Louis Pasteur’s side against the establishment figure of Charlton Bastian, Professor of Pathological Anatomy at University College, London, but was strongly backed, like Darwin, by T.H. Huxley. While the debate had, of course, immense importance for medical practice and for public health measures generally, there were indirect but significant implications for theology and, more particularly, for contemporary theodicy.11

Secondly, Tyndall had become interested in the closely associated topic of epidemic disease affecting animals, insects and plants – then an issue of increasing concern both in Britain and in Europe, because of its economic and social impact. In an early book, Mountaineering in 1861, Tyndall had described the local custom of having a priest “bless the mountain” to ensure “food and shelter for the flocks and herds of the Valaisians”:

He [the priest] was not so presumptuous as to expect a miracle, but he firmly believed that in yonder cloud-land matters could be so arranged, without trespass on the miraculous, that the stream which threatened him and his flocks should be caused to shrink within its proper bounds.12

Tyndall made evident his scepticism as to both the possibility of miracles and the value of prayer, and observed that, were either possible, then –

… it necessarily follows that natural laws are more or less at the mercy of man’s volition, and no conclusion founded on the assumed permanence of those laws would be worthy of confidence.13

And he continued:

It is a wholesome sign for England that she numbers among her clergy men wise enough to understand this, and courageous enough to act up to their knowledge. Such men do service to the public character by encouraging a manly and intelligent conflict with the causes of disease and scarcity, instead of a defensive reliance on supernatural aid.14

This was a reference to (amongst others) A.P. Stanley, Dean of Westminster, who (after consulting Tyndall on the matter) was subsequently to controvert the combined recommendations, in 1866, of the Anglican Church bishops, the Chief Rabbi of Britain and the Free Church of Scotland, to pray for relief from the then prevalent cattle plague.15 In 1871, as Frank Turner describes, the Prince of Wales, Albert, fell gravely ill with typhoid but his sudden recovery pre-empted the call for a special day of prayer. Instead, it was pronounced that a national day of Thanksgiving would be held, prompting Tyndall to propose, through the pages of the Contemporary Review, that the efficacy of prayer should be assessed by means of a controlled experiment within a hospital setting.16 Nineteenth century theologians had considerable difficulty in finding a rationale for contagious disease: in the previous century, apologists such as Bishop Butler could ignore the problem.17 By 1835, on the other hand, Thomas Chalmers could not comfortably ascribe suffering from disease to moral causes.18 The most that he could offer in explanation, from a theological point of view, was that:

Suffering without a cause and without an object, may be the infliction of a malignant being.19

Thirdly, Tyndall had chosen to oppose Tait and Thomson on a vital point of physics – the nature of the ether. All physicists were by then united in believing that an ether existed. By analogy with the observable waves created by a pebble thrown into water, it could be inferred that sound waves in air were similarly propagated and consequently that light waves behaved in a similar fashion, due to molecular movement (“vibration”) within a hypothesised medium.20 Tyndall’s description of this was, in itself, quite uncontroversial:

The answer to this question [how light is transmitted] involves perhaps the most important physical conception that the mind of man has yet achieved: the conception of a medium filling space and fitted mechanically for the transmission of the vibration of light and heat, as air is fitted for the transmission of sound. This medium is called the lumeniferous æther. Every vibration of every atom … raises in this æther a wave, which speeds through it at the rate of 186,000 miles a second.21

Maxwell, in his Treatise, was to extend this concept to electro-magnetic waves generally. The problem for physicists of the day lay, not in the assumption of an ether (which theoretically seemed utterly convincing), but in determining its actual nature. In this respect, the interesting properties of glacial ice seemed to offer a clue – all were agreed that glaciers moved, yet the obviously brittle nature of ice seemed at odds with its observed fluidity. In the eighth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, J.D. Forbes had argued for the “Viscous or Plastic Theory of glacier motion”22 and it was this viscous property of ice which, if common also to the ether, might be used to account for the manner in which molecular forces were transmitted, not only in the form of light and heat but also in the propagation of electro-magnetic waves. Tyndall himself did not happily accept the notion of glacial viscosity, preferring to explain the flow of glaciers by reference to a recurring process of “fracture and regelation”23 and this issue became as bitter a matter of controversy as that of investigative priority.24

The argument was at its height in 1873-74, John Ruskin having incontinently joined the melée within the influential but idiosyncratic pages of his own publication, Fors Clavigera.25 What began as a robust attack26 by Ruskin on Tyndall27 developed into a more even-handed account of the perversities of scientific disputation and Ruskin showed some capacity for objectivity and humour in quoting, against himself and Tait, an (unattributed) newspaper article of the time:28

Meantime, here … is a lively account of the present state of affairs, with a compliment to Professor Tyndall on his style of debate, which I humbly beg to endorse – “… we have no rash intention of venturing into that terrible battleground where Professor Ruskin is laying about him with his Fors Clavigera, and where Professor Tait, like another Titan, hurls wildly into the affrighted air such epithets as ‘contemptible’, ‘miserable’, ‘disgusting’, ‘pernicious’, ‘pestilent’. These adjectives, for anything that ignorant journalists can know, may mean, in Scotch scientific parlance, everything that is fair, chivalrous, becoming and measured in argument. But … we cannot help remarking how much more consistent with the dignity of science appears Professor Tyndall’s answer in the last number of the Contemporary Review.29 If it be true that the man who keeps his temper is generally in the right, we shall decidedly back Professor Tyndall and the late lamented Agassiz in the present dreadful conflict …” .30

The “wretched” Address

It was in this overheated atmosphere that Tyndall’s Presidential Address31 was delivered to the Belfast meeting of the B.A., with Maxwell and Robertson Smith both present, but in Tait’s conspicuous absence. Even by the standards of the time, it was a prolix disquisition, covering the development of scientific thought from its classical Greek origins to its latest manifestations in the work of Tyndall’s contemporaries, and plainly the speaker was intent on using this unique opportunity to the full for disseminating his personal views on the importance of scientific endeavour. In this aim Tyndall undoubtedly succeeded, if one is to judge by its public impact.32 Despite Smith’s condemnation of the speech, there was much in it that ought to have resonated with his own views.

Tyndall began with a reference to the importance of mankind’s age-old curiosity “towards the source of natural phenomena”, a topic that he had already explored extensively in his discourse on “The scientific use of the imagination” at the B.A. meeting at Liverpool in 187033 when he had counselled “the scientific teacher … to clear his own mind of all haze and vagueness, and then to project into language which shall leave no mistake as to his meaning … the definite ideas he has shaped”34 and at the same time had strongly commended Darwin’s theories as evidence of how “observation, imagination and reason have combined with wonderful sagacity and success over a certain length of the biological succession”.35

The pre-scientific atomic theories of Democritus, Lucretius and Epicurus, Tyndall went on, demonstrated the richness and fertility of the human mind and those classical speculations on the ultimate basis of matter foreshadowed Maxwell’s contemporary theory of the atom. “Why,” he asked, “was the scientific intellect compelled, like an exhausted soil, to lie fallow for nearly two millenniums before it could regather the elements necessary to its fertility and strength?”36 For Tyndall, the answer lay in the advent of Christianity and the consequent repression of free thought:

The Scriptures which ministered to their spiritual needs were also the measure of their science. When, for example, the celebrated question of the antipodes came to be discussed, the Bible was with many the ultimate court of appeal. Augustine … would not deny the rotundity of the earth; but he would deny the possible existence of inhabitants at the other side, “because no such race is recorded in Scripture among the descendants of Adam”. Archbishop Boniface was astonished at the assumption of “a world of human beings out of the reach of the means of salvation”. Thus reined in, Science was not likely to make much progress.37

Here Tyndall drew extensively upon the writings of the decidedly anti-clerical (and vehemently anti-Catholic) American scientist and popularizing writer, John William Draper,38 who, in his 1862 book, The Intellectual Development of Europe, had pilloried the repressive obscurantism of the Christian Church throughout its existence,39 and who had returned to the same theme in 1874, with The Conflict between Religion and Science40, wherein the inexorable progress of naturalistic science, “as the marvels of superstition were displaced by the wonders of truth,”41 is contrasted with “those deliberate falsifications of history, that concealment of historical facts, of which the Church has so often taken advantage”.42

Perhaps unwisely, Tyndall was over-dependent on Draper’s unsubtle polemic:43 certainly, he moved to safer ground when quoting Whewell’s more generalised reasons for the delay in western scientific progress – “obscurity of thought, servility, intolerance of disposition, enthusiasm of temper”44 – or when criticising the shortcomings of Aristotle and Goethe. He then traced the modern development of atomic theory from Gassendi to Maxwell, acknowledging but not fully accepting Maxwell’s speculative analogy of atoms with “manufactured articles” in their uniformity and identity: it was, said Tyndall, “the basis of an induction, which enables him to scale philosophic heights considered inaccessible by Kant, and to take the logical step from the atoms to their Maker”.45

There followed a long but important digression on consciousness, presented in the form of an imaginary debate between a Lucretian disciple and Bishop Butler, who (Tyndall notes) “still influences superior minds”46 and who had argued for the non-material and indissoluble nature of mind on the basis of such arguments as, “… if we see with our eyes only in the same manner as we do with glasses, the like may justly be concluded from analogy of all our senses”.47 Tyndall’s Lucretian disciple challenges Butler thus, in terms which Alexander Bain would strongly have approved:

It seems very singular that, from beginning to end of your admirable book (and no one admires its sober strength more than I do), you never once mention the brain or the nervous system. You begin at one end of the body, and show that its parts may be removed without prejudice to the perceiving power. What if you begin at the other end, and remove, instead of the leg, the brain? … To regard the brain as you would a staff or an eyeglass – to shut your eyes to all its mystery, to the perfect correlation of its condition and our consciousness, to the fact that a slight excess or defect of blood in it produces the very swoon to which you refer,48 and that in relation to it our meat and drink and air and exercise have a perfectly transcendental value and significance – to forget all this does, I think, open a way to innumerable errors in our habits of life, and may possibly in some cases initiate and foster that very disease, and consequent mental ruin, which a wiser appreciation of this mysterious organ would have avoided.49

To this neatly-turned argument in favour of the superior moral and sanative virtues of a materialistic philosophy, Tyndall has Butler patiently enquire how life is to be created out of dead matter:

Imagine them [the atoms] separate and sensationless; observe them running together and forming all imaginable combinations. This, as a purely mechanical process, is seeable by the mind. But can you see, or dream, or in any way imagine, how out of all that mechanical act, and from these individually dead atoms, sensation, thought and emotion are to arise? Are you likely to extract Homer out of the rattling of dice, or the Differential Calculus out of the clash of billiard-balls? … What baffles and bewilders me – is the notion that from these physical tremors things so utterly incongruous with them as sensation, thought, and emotion can be derived… You are the cause of the apparent incongruity; and you are the thing that puzzles me… . This is a rock on which materialism must inevitably split whenever it pretends to be a complete philosophy of life.50

Tyndall notes that Butler himself had recognised that the concept of immortality (and hence, he implies, of the soul) must apply, if to man, then to all sentient creation;51 but he proceeds:

Bishop Butler accepted with unvarying trust the chronology of the Old Testament [yet] … it is hardly necessary to inform you that since his time the domain of the naturalist has been immensely extended – the whole science of geology, with its astounding revelations regarding the life of the ancient earth, having been created.52

From geology, Tyndall progressed to Darwinian and Lamarckian theories of evolution, and to Huxley’s concise and masterly explication of Darwin’s writings.53 As Tyndall correctly observed, Darwin’s strength lay in the patient accumulation of observed detail together with his steadfast identification of every problematic aspect of his theory:

Mr Darwin shirks no difficulty … he treats every objection with a soberness and thoroughness which even Bishop Butler might be proud to imitate … he moves over the subject with the passionless strength of a glacier; and the grinding of the rocks is not without a counterpart in the logical pulverization of the objector… His success has been great; and this implies not only the solidity of his work but the preparedness of the public mind for such a revelation.54

Finally, after a rather incautious presentation of Herbert Spencer’s Lamarckian interpretation of social, intellectual and moral evolution,55 Tyndall confronts the issue that is central to his philosophy – “the mysterious control of Mind by Matter”.56 The proof of life’s derivation from inorganic sources being as yet absent, Tyndall invited his audience to employ the process of imaginative but logical projection (which he had described in his paper, “The scientific use of the imagination”) to fill the gaps in human understanding of “the manifestation of a Power absolutely inscrutable to the intellect of man”;57 and, with a brief acknowledgement of the emotional value of religious sensibility (dangerous though that feeling may be58) he reaches his somewhat ambiguously-stated conclusion:

The impregnable position of science may be described in a few words. We claim, and we shall wrest, from theology the entire domain of cosmological theory. All schemes and systems which thus infringe upon the domain of science must, in so far as they do this, submit to its control, and relinquish all thought of controlling it … When this truth has been thoroughly taken in, rigidity will be relaxed, exclusiveness diminished, things now deemed essential will be assimilated. The lifting of the life is the essential point; and as long as dogmatism, fanaticism, and intolerance are kept out, various modes of leverage may be employed to raise life to a higher level.59

Tyndall dislikes Whewell’s view of “enthusiasm of temper as a hindrance to science”: he himself would seek to have science pursued with all the evangelical fervour formerly associated with the propagation of religion; and he regrets that Thomas Carlyle (“one amongst us, hoary, but still strong, whose prophet-voice some thirty years ago, far more than any other of this age, unlocked whatever of life and nobleness lay latent in its most gifted minds”) did not ultimately “open his mind to science and make his conclusions a portion of his message to mankind” – for:

Marvellously endowed as he was – equally equipped on the side of the Heart and of the Understanding – he might have done much towards teaching us how to reconcile the claims of both, and to enable them in coming times to dwell together in unity of spirit and in the bond of peace.60

In a concluding peroration, however, Tyndall warns his audience that the eirenic goal of a harmony between theology and science may not be possible, for the purchase of intellectual peace may prove too costly and may entail “intellectual death”:

The unstable and the weak have yielded, and will yield, to this persuasion, and they to whom repose is sweeter than the truth. But I would exhort you to refuse the offered shelter, and to scorn the base repose – to accept, if the choice be forced upon you, commotion before stagnation, the leap of the torrent before the stillness of the swamp. In the course of this address I have touched on debatable questions, and led you over what will be deemed dangerous ground – and this partly with the view of telling you that as regards these questions science claims unrestricted right of search.61

The repercussions

Nothing that Tyndall had said was new, but the issues raised had previously been discreetly discussed within the guarded confines of academic journals or university combination rooms. B.A. Presidents had, in recent years, grown increasingly outspoken but not even Huxley had dared be so confrontational. In choosing the medium of his Presidential Address to the B.A., Tyndall ensured the widest possible dissemination for his views, presented with a frankness that had scarcely been risked before. Literary references to the controversy, even subsequent to Tyndall’s Belfast address, still tended to picture the earlier situation, whereby these matters were argued in relative privacy, as a form of intercourse between consenting adults. Amongst the most interesting of such accounts is W.H. Mallock’s The New Republic,62 that curious yet illuminating roman à clef where, in the context of a country house weekend, the lightly disguised protagonists, who include Thomas Huxley, Tyndall, Benjamin Jowett, Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin, exhaustively debate the changing face of Victorian faith.

Amongst the more immediate reactions to Tyndall’s address, none can have been more swiftly committed to print than Robertson Smith’s captious letter to the Belfast Northern Whig.63 This is of relevance in illustrating Smith’s growing interest in the origins of religion but (like his attacks on Mill, Hutcheson Stirling and Bain) it suffers from his youthful proclivity for focusing upon minor details, rather than debating the broad issues.64 Moreover, at this stage Smith remained strongly under the sway of Tait’s intense anti-Tyndall prejudice: indeed it is probable that his former mentor had placed him under strict instructions to offer a rapid and hostile response.

After craving the editor’s indulgence to permit him to offer “a few fragmentary remarks”, Smith proceeds:

Professor Tyndall begins his address with a lemma from the history of early religion. He tells us that the impulse to search into the causes of things produced in primeval times anthropomorphic polytheism, and he expresses this view of the origin of religion by the aid of a citation from Hume. When I turn to Hume I find that the Scottish philosopher in the passage referred to is expressly combating the theory approved by Professor Tyndall. 65

The issue here – whether the springs of religion derived from observation of natural phenomena (Tyndall’s contention) or from human hope and fears (Hume) seems relatively unimportant in the context of Tyndall’s address. Smith’s real opposition to the Tyndallic philosophy is summed up in his assertion:

No materialistic philosophy can raise man above the uncertainties of human life. Bondage to the fear of the unknown and unforeseen misfortune can be broken only by a doctrine of providence.

Smith then proceeded to criticise Tyndall’s “blunders” in calling up the Greek atomists in his support, while at the same time belittling Aristotle; and finally he took Tyndall to task for speaking of “the [intellectual] barrenness of the Christian Middle Ages in contrast with the intellectual activity of the Arabs” – a view which Smith described as “at least a century behind the present state of historical research”. And there WRS ended, with no more than a clever Parthian shot at Tyndall for having relied on the somewhat unscholarly Draper for so much of his historical information:

How guilelessly Dr Tyndall in this part of his address accepts all assimilable material that is put before him appears in a very comic light in the assertion that “the under-garment of ladies retains to this hour its Arab name”. No doubt if this were true the intellectual superiority of the Moors over the Christians would be clearly made out, but the word camisia is older than Jerome.66

As a striking contrast to Smith’s response, it is worth citing the rapturous reaction to Tyndall’s address on the part of the poet Swinburne, who wrote to Theodore Watts67 on August 29:

My mind is very full now of Tyndall’s magnificent address which I have read with great care and greater admiration. Science so enlarged and harmonized gives me a sense as much of rest as of light. No mythology can make its believers feel less afraid or loth to be reabsorbed into the immeasurable harmony with but the change of a single individual note in a single bar of the tune, than does the faintest perception of the lowest chord touched in the whole system of things. Even my technical ignorance does not impair, I think, my power to see accurately and seize firmly the first thread of the great clue, because my habit of mind is not (I hope) unscientific, though my work lies in the field of art instead of science: and when seen and seized even the first perception gives me an indescribable feeling of music and repose. It is Theism which to me seems to introduce an element – happily a factitious element – of doubt, discord and disorder.68

More publicly, the free-thinking and violently anti-clerical poet, James Thomson, defended Tyndall vigorously after Bishop Alfred had ridiculed the address in a sermon preached in September, 1874:

What possible excuse has this Bishop Alfred for asserting that such a man as Tyndall is vain, proud, sinful; that he rejects the law of God because that law is holy, just and good; that he “affects Atheism” not for want of evidence of God’s existence, but because he loves darkness rather than light? Where are the Christians who morally and intellectually are superior or equal to the champion of science?69

Though WRS would never have stomached such atheistic sentiments, he would have found Bishop Alfred’s reactionary defence of a literal interpretation of the Bible just as unacceptable as Thomson, who continued:

I can give no stronger proof of the Bishop’s utter ignorance or ignoring of modern science, of his perfect incompetence to deal with the subject, than this: “The record of creation, properly expounded, is entirely consistent with facts around us, physical and moral, and as far as it goes, and in all that we can comprehend, it is perfect and complete”.70

The absence of real fervour in Smith’s own attack on Tyndall’s address, together with its limited scope, suggests that he was dutifully conforming to Tait’s instruction to make an instant riposte but it also indicates something of the unconscious inner tension that already existed within the young professor. Under his father’s guidance and personal interest in scientific advances,71 pursuit of the scientific method in theology had become a cardinal principle, yet it was impossible, given his strongly evangelical upbringing, for WRS to accept Tyndall’s frank materialism and anti-supernaturalism, despite the latter’s acknowledgement of the religious sentiment as an innate and valued human faculty.

Clerk Maxwell’s response was just as characteristic. For Tait’s entertainment and enlightenment alike, he skilfully penned a concise account of the address in verse, some of which merits quotation as a further illustration, not only of Maxwell’s wit, charm and broad tolerance, but also of his consummate ability to encapsulate the essence of Tyndall’s long and discursive disquisition within less than fifty lines:

In the very beginnings of science, the parsons, who managed things then,
Being handy with hammer and chisel, made gods in the likeness of men;
Till commerce arose, and at length some men of exceptional power
Supplanted both demons and gods by the atoms, which last to this hour.
Yet they did not abolish the gods, but they sent them well out of the way,
With the rarest of nectar to drink, and blue fields of nothing to sway.
From nothing comes nothing, they told us, nought happens by chance, but by fate;
There is nothing but atoms and void, all else is mere whims out of date!
Then why should a man curry favour with beings who cannot exist,
To compass some petty promotion in nebulous kingdoms of mist?
But not by the rays of the sun, nor the glittering shafts of the day,
Must the fear of the gods be dispelled, but by words, and their wonderful play…
… Let us damn with faint praise Bishop Butler, in whom many atoms combined
To form that remarkable structure which it pleased him to call – his mind.
Last, praise we the noble body to which, for the time, we belong,
Ere yet the swift wind of the atoms has hurried us, ruthless, along,
The British Association – like Leviathan worshipped by Hobbes,
The incarnation of wisdom, built up of our witless nobs,
Which will carry on endless discussions, when I, and possibly you,
Have melted in infinite azure – and, in short, till all is blue. 72

Maxwell’s adroit mention of Bishop Butler touches upon the increasing centrality of the mind and body issue, by now seriously threatening to polarise the scientific world itself, as Principal John Tulloch was to observe in a detailed critique of Tyndall’s address, published in the same number of Blackwood’s Magazine as Maxwell’s poetic précis.73 A liberal-minded and intellectually acute leader of the established church in Scotland, Tulloch was later to make a strongly sympathetic appraisal of Robertson Smith’s views on the Bible.74 Here, in a paper entitled “Modern scientific materialism”, he shrewdly analyses the implications for theology (and more generally for religion) of this contemporary development:

It is a great thing, no doubt, to extend the boundaries of science, and to apply its verifying tests to the explanation of all phenomena; but it is also a serious thing to meddle rashly with the foundation of human belief and society, especially when one has nothing better to suggest than the old guesses of a philosophy which has more than once failed to satisfy even the intellectual aspirations of mankind.75

There are many weaknesses in Tulloch’s critique: he is frequently impelled to indulge in rather heavy-handed sarcasm; his judgment is sometimes impaired by emotion; and (as in the statement above) he unjustly accuses the proponents of the then modern atomic theory of substantially offering up anew the primitive speculations of Democritus and Epicurus. Nevertheless, he does succeed in identifying many of the more crucial issues. As an eminent and “popular Expositor of science”, Tyndall was bound, said Tulloch, to draw criticism upon himself “when he comes forth from his lecture-room to address the world on those old and great subjects which lie at the foundation of all human knowledge and belief”.76 Tulloch observed that, in doing so, Tyndall, like Huxley, had taken on the “rôle of Prophet, and [had] invited men to look beyond the facts and laws of science to the origin of things in its highest sense”.77 In recognising this, Tulloch implicitly raised the question (soon to confront both Robertson Smith and the Free Church alike) of whether certain subjects or phenomena were intrinsically too “sacred” to be the subject of scientific investigation. Well-educated, thoughtful Protestants like Tulloch were only too aware of the disastrous consequences of those many notorious ecclesiastical attempts (such as those which Draper had glibly enumerated) to suppress or denounce scientific discovery; despite that, their natural reaction was to perceive such intrusion into spiritual realms as a reckless, foolhardy and – just conceivably – an immoral act. Certainly, there was, for Tulloch, an unfortunate element of irreverence, if not of profanity, in such intrusive curiosity:

Religion is, after all, a great fact in human life and history – as great as any with which science can deal. It is the highest of human experiences, and should never be approached without something of the reverence, and sense of mystery, and tenderness, and depth of insight which belong to its essential nature.78

To ventilate such views, moreover, at the annual meeting of the British Association, was, Tulloch argued, unwise and unbecoming:

It is a bad thing in itself, and it is bad for the British Association, to minister to the crude appetites of these neophytes of the Modern Spirit, who have laid aside religion without any capacity of rational thought on their own behalf.79

Freely admitting Tyndall’s expository skills, Tulloch nevertheless (and not unfairly) attacks “the antagonism which he [Tyndall] everywhere implies between science and religion”80 and (like Smith) he challenges Tyndall’s use of Hume’s Natural History of Religion to sustain the charge of anthropomorphism against Christianity itself.81 As to the theory of evolution, Principal Tulloch hardly expects Mr Darwin to be pleased by Tyndall’s praise;82 as it is, the idea of evolution is just as conducive to the notion of a Divine Intelligence as is the concept of special creation.83 Indeed, to postulate a Divine Mind is “a purely rational necessity, the dictate of our highest consciousness and insight into the meaning both of man and of the world around him”84 – for it is Tyndall’s conception of Mind deriving from Matter which ultimately so pains, puzzles and alarms Principal Tulloch. The existence of Mind is testimony to man’s creation in the divine image and to conceive of rationality originating out of mere matter is quite reprehensible:

It is strange that our modern philosophers should crave so much for a material than a spiritual origin – and still more strange that they should think the one mode of origin more dignified than the other … it is an odd phase of human vanity which insists on setting physical phenomena above those of the human mind, and seeing in the former, rather than in the latter, the type of all being. Man may have made too much of himself in the past, but after all he has his rights; and there is surely nothing greater in Nature than Mind which alone understands it, and reduces it to science.85

Tulloch concludes with a plea for gentlemanly decorum and amity: why should Tyndall rake up all those past errors of theology and harp over the old strain of persecution? Those days are long gone.86 Nevertheless, it is only proper that science should cease to trespass upon territory that is not its own:

Let him pursue his investigations without fear or alarm. But let him also bear in mind that, if science has her rights, so has religion, and that the great ideas which lie at the foundations of all religion are unspeakably precious to many minds no less enlightened than his own, if not exactly after his fashion of enlightenment. What such minds resent in his Address is not, what he seems to think, any free handling of old ideas, so far as they come legitimately within the range of science – but the constant insinuation that these new conceptions of science are at variance with the old truths of religion, or with the truths of a Personal God and of immortality.87

This was a stalwart defence of traditional values but the cogency of Tulloch’s case was weakened throughout by his appeal to arguments that no longer had validity (as in his “territorial claims” for religion) and in his criticism of Tyndall’s “leap of faith” beyond the bounds of experimental evidence, as being “illegitimate and unscientific”. One might fairly judge that honours were even at this stage of the battle.

Rumours of the controversy quickly penetrated, however, beyond the pages of the more serious periodicals, and Punch took up the scent, having already lampooned Don Carlos, heir to the Spanish throne, for uttering sentiments (in an interview with the New York Herald) not dissimilar to Tulloch’s:

The world is rushing into gross materialism and unbelief – a materialism which, if not checked, will end in the extinction of the human race. The fault of all this is in the modern godless system of education, the modern methods of investigation. The so-called savans [sic] of the day, who will be called fools by the savans of twenty years hence, wish us to discard the truth which has borne the test of ages, and to accept their whimsical theories instead. Spain shall never do this if I can help it.88

A week later, Punch sought to emulate Maxwell’s epitome of Tyndall’s address with its own poetic but less impartial version:

Tyndall, high-perched on Speculation’s summit,
May drop his sounding-line in Nature’s ocean,
But that great deep has depths beyond his plummet,
The springs of law and life, mind, matter, motion …

… But, even as Milton’s demons, problem-tossed,
When they had set their Maker at defiance,
Still ‘found no end, in wandering mazes lost,’
So is it with our modern men of science … .

Pray who may be the fittest to survive,
The spark of thought for coming time to kindle,
The sacred fire of science keep alive? –
Plato, Agassiz, Humboldt, Huxley, Tyndall?

If Tyndall’s last word be indeed the last –
Of hope and faith hence with each rag and tatter!
A black cloud shrouds our future as our past;
Matter, the wise man’s God: the Crowd’s – no matter!89

The attitude expressed by Punch is characteristically conservative and arguably simplistic; it is well reflected in one of its lines not quoted above: “Our question: Doth not law imply law-giver?” At the same time, its pages could always be relied upon to be more outspoken and less inhibited than its graver contemporaries; and thus it was quite prepared to lampoon, with equal irreverence, all deviations from conventional thinking, whether these concerned evolution, atomic theory, ritualism or papal infallibility. In this respect the pages of Punch often expose the deeper fears, latent within the collective mind of the Victorian public:

Then bow down, Mind, to Matter; from brain-fibre, Will, withdraw;
Fall Man’s heart to cell Ascidian, sink Man’s hand to Monkey’s paw;
And bend the knee to Protoplast in philosophic awe –
Both Creator and Created, at once work and source of Law,
And our Lord be the Atom-Molecule,
Of the young World’s proto-prime!90