The Greatest Writer of the 19th Century » Brownson's Writings » Professor Tyndall's Address

Professor Tyndall's Address

 

Professor Tyndall’s Address
January, 1875
If any proof were wanted of the anti-Christian sentiments and tendencies of contemporary scientists, and the neglect of the higher branches of a thorough education, the general ignorance of the simplest elements of religion, and the fearful intellectual abasement, we might almost say intellectual imbecility, of the leaders of the age, we might find it in the fact that such an address as this by professor Tyndall could be delivered before an association of professedly scientific men, and when published should produce a profound impression, and be received with no little favor by the public opinion. The address, aside from a certain pomp of diction, an emphasis, and an air of superiority and assurance with which Englishmen usually conceal their ignorance and poverty of thought, has nothing remarkable about it. It contains nothing that we have not heard in substance over and over again, ad nauseam, from our very boyhood. We discover in it a passable rhetorician, but no logician, no thinker, no scholar, nr even an ordinarily well-informed gentleman, outside of certain of the special sciences, which he may have cultivated with more or less success. In regard to the subjects treated in this address, whatever he knows or thinks he knows, he has picked up at third of fourth hand; and in reality he know simply nothing, not even that he knows nothing of them, and only makes a fool of himself in the eyes of all who have studied them and really do know something of them. Yet John Tyndall is a great man, one of the demigods of the scientific world in this nineteenth century, the inventor of a smoke respirator!
                Before proceeding to any particular examination of this very pretentious, but really flimsy, Address itself, whose tinsel the public mistake for solid gold, we wish to call attention to an unwarrantable assumption with regard to the religious history of mankind, on which the author and his infidel brother-scientist base their theorizing on religion and theology. This assumption is, that the gross heathen superstitions were the earliest forms with which the religious sentiment clothed itself; and that the history of the developments, changes, and modifications these superstitions undergo from nation to nation and from age to age, presents the complete religious history of the race. Deprive them of this assumption, and all their theorizing on the subject of religion falls to the ground. Yet for this assumption there is not only not one particle of historical proof, but the direct and positive testimony of history to the contrary. History shows us the human race in possession of a pure and holy religion, the worship of the one living and true God, Creator of heaven and earth, before a single trace of any of these heathen superstitions is discoverable. These superstition sand one and all of them fruits of the great Gentile apostasy from the primitive and true religion; and their developments, changes, and modifications are due to the efforts of men and nations who have lost the true system of the universe, and find themselves without clothing or shelter in this wintry world, to construct out of their reminiscences and their own “inner Consciousness” some sort of covering for their nakedness, and some sort of protection from the winter’s blast, just as we see individuals and nations that have apostatized from Christ and protested against the Papacy, now doing. Having forsaken the Fountain of Living Waters they are fain “to hew out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that will hold no water.” The origin, developments, and changes of the heathen superstitions may be read in the origin, developments, and changes of your modern Protestant sects. The world outside of the Church traverses a circle, and ever and anon comes round to its starting-point, as does the poor lad who has lost his head in the woods. There is progress only in the Church; only in her does a man recover his lost head, and find his way home.
            Not only do our scientists take the history of the heathen superstitions for the history of religion, but they take the theology, to which they oppose their scientific deductions or inductions, from Protestant and theologians. The only class of scientists we have any acquaintance with, who give any indications even of the most superficial knowledge of Christian theology are the Positivists; and the speak of it, as of Christianity itself, with less disrespect than do the other classes of infidel scientist. There is little in Protestant theology that we can ourselves respect; and there can be no greater mistake, although it may recognize some fragments of Christian truth, than to confound it with Christian theology. Protestants theologians are floundering about to find truth as were the heathen philosophers, and are equally untrustworthy as guides, or as interpreters of the cosmos and religion. Even a victory of the scientists over Protestant theology would count for nothing with us. Professor Tyndall may batter away as much as he pleases against the Anglican Bishop Butler, for whom we have not and never had the least respect. We only pray the professor not to mistake the Anglican bishop for a Catholic theologian. His much praised “Analogy” is at best only a retort of the Deist’s silly objection, that Christian faith asserts incomprehensible mysteries: and the retort proves nothing. When the scientist wishes to attack Christianity, he should take an authentic statement of it, and aim his blows at the very heart of the Christian system, not at its mere accessories. Christianity is a whole and must be refuted as a whole, that is, in its principles, if refuted at all. Protestantism is not a whole, is only a jumble of fragments.
            But in turning to the Address itself, we are struck with its vagueness, indecision, and emptiness. It lacks method, distinctness of aim, and explicitness of doctrine. The orator seems to have a good deal of fighting him, but is not quite certain as to his enemy, or at what head he is to strike. He appears to be dealing fearful blows at some formidable, but invisible, foe; yet whether against a real foe or only a spectre of his own fancy, is more than we can determine. What he wants we know not, and what obstacles he encounters, or imagines he encounters, we see not; only this is certain, that he nowhere in his Address speaks as a scientist, in the proper sense of the term; but from beginning to end he is out of the field of science and in that of philosophy or theology, both of which he professes to despise, and of both of which he is as innocent of knowing anything as the child not yet born. He who opposes or tries to make away with philosophy and theology, is as much in their province as he who defends them. He treats of religion who seeks to overthrow it, no less than he who labors to vindicate it.
            The Address defies analysis. It has no unity, no principle, no thesis, which it labors to develop, elucidate, and defend; and it proves nothing but the orator’s ignorance, arrogance, and hostility to religion. It sets forth no scientific truth, but simply reproduces as science-and does not understand that-the old exploded theory of materialism, as taught by the heathen Democritus, and as subsequently held by Epicurus, and sung by Lucretius. He denies the soul and its immortality, and the existence of a supercosmic, intelligent, and creative God; that is, he says with “the fool in his heart, NON EST DEUS,”- there is no God: therefore “let us eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die.” This is all we have found in this marvelous Address, over which Professor Youmans, of the Popular Science Monthly, is in raptures, and even bewildered by the general favor with which it has been received. But the worthy professor mush be pardoned, for he does not know the difference between pantheism or atheism and theism, and believes fully that Herbert Spencer is not only a great philosopher, but a marvelously devout Christian!
            The N. Y. Herald calls upon the theologians to give Professor Tyndall’s utterances a serious refutation. But why should it make such a call, as if Tyndall had brought forward anything which the theologians have not refuted a hundred times over, any time during the last eighteen centuries? Then, who is this Professor Tyndall? What mighty claims has he to public consideration? In his own line, in some one or more of the special sciences, he may have been a successful student; but in this Address he is not treating any one of the special sciences; he is not in his own line of study, in which he has acquired whatever distinction he has attained to in the scientific world, but trenches on the province of the theologian, of which he knows nothing. Because he has some reputation in some of the physical sciences, has invented a smoke respirator, has he thereby proved his ability to instruct us in philosophy, in theology, theogony, cosmogony, or in sciences that lie entirely above his line, and on which his studies throw not a single ray of light? We let him answer for us: -
“When the human mind has achieved greatness and given evidence of extraordinary power in any domain, there is a tendency to credit it with similar power in all other domains. Thus theologians have found comfort and assurance in the thought that Newton dealt with the question of revelation, forgetful of the fact that the very devotion of his powers, through all the best ears of his life, to a totally different class of ideas, not to speak of any natural disqualifications, tended to render him less instead of more competent to deal with theological and historical questions.”
This is his own protest against his being cited as authority in the domain in which lies his Address. Whatever extraordinary power he may or may not have shown in some other domain, he has shown none in that; and, according to his own reasoning, his very studies have unfitted him, in some degree at least, to do it. We wish our scientists would heed Professors Tyndall’s admonition, and especially we wish that he had heeded it himself.
            Science, the Popular Science Monthly tells us, deals only with second causes, and leaves the First Cause to religion, or the theologians. This use of the term sciences, which the scientists affect, is in some degree censurable, and not warranted by the genius of our mother-tongue. It is a misnomer, for what is meant is not science in its unity and universality, but the sciences, sometimes called “the inductive sciences,” “the Exact sciences,” and sometimes “the physical sciences,” as distinguished from the mental and moral sciences, that is, from philosophical and theological science. What is meant to be asserted is, if we charitably suppose the scientists or physicists know what they mean, that the sciences treat only of second causes not First Cause, or of secondary, not of first, principles. We will accept this statement, which has Professor Youmans for its authority, supposes that there is a first cause, and that there are second causes. But second causes are and can only be created causes, since necessarily dependent on the First Cause; and if with Democritus, Empedocles, Epicurus, Lucretius, Herbert Spence, and Professor Tyndall, we deny creation, or that the First Cause is a creative God, there are and can be no second Causes, and, consequently, no science, for then there will be no subject for the sciences to treat. Somebody has said: “An atheist may be a geometrician; but if there were no God, that is, no Creator, there could be no geometry.”
            But, assigning to the sciences second causes as their domain, which we are told is all they claim, we assign them simply the observation and classification of facts; for second causes are themselves only facts, not real causes or principles, except in a relative and subordinate sense, since they are created and dependent on the First Cause, from whom they all hold all they are, can be, or do. They are causes only in relation to their own effects. They have no original or independent causative power, no proper creative force or energy, and can only explicate the potentialities of the productions of the First Cause, while, in relation to the First Cause, they are neither causes nor principles, but simply facts. As long as the scientists confine themselves to the investigation of facts and their classification according to their second causes or their generic principles, which, as being only secondary causes or their generic principles, which, as being only secondary r relative, are themselves in the order facts, they are in their proper domain; and philosophers, and even theologians who deal with first or absolute principles, will maintain them in it, respect and defend their rights and independence, and count them useful and even indispensable allies or auxiliaries. But the quarrel breaks out, not from the attempt of philosophy or theology to encroach on the domain of the sciences, or to construct them by a-priori reasoning, as Professor Tyndall falsely or ignorantly pretends; but from the persistence of the scientists to extend their inductions beyond the order of facts to the order of first principles, and thus to usurp the province of philosophy or theology.
            This is precisely what Professor Tyndall attempts in this Address before the British Association. He seeks to absorb the First Cause in the second, the primary in the secondary, principles in the facts which proceed from them, and are dependent on them. Thus he asserts materialism, that is, denies the spiritual element in man, and maintains that life, thought, feeling, love, and hatred, joy and grief, hope and fear, are produced by the mechanical combinations of material atoms, themselves without life, thought, or sense. This, of course is a mere theory, without the slightest scientific value, for it transcends the order of facts or of second causes. It is of no more value than the astronomer Lalande’s assentation, “I have never seen God at the end of my telescope.” Suppose you have not seen him, there is no God? Your conclusion is invalid; first because it is not in the order of facts, or in the order of your premises; and second, because, from a simple negation, nothing can be concluded. Professor Tyndall must show it possible for lifeless, senseless, brute matter to generate animal motion, life, sense, thought, reason, before he can assert his materialism, or the Democritan doctrine of the origin of life and sense in the mechanical, chemical, or electric combination of lifeless and senseless atoms. Ex nihilo nihil fit; to which it may be added that other axiom, Nemo dat quod non habet. You cannot in the compound get what is not in the components, as you can have in the whole only the sum of the parts. In your chemical compounds you get new forms, no doubt, but no new elements or substance, as every chemist is well aware. How, then, from your combinations of atoms, get what, confessedly, they do not contain? The professor, in his imaginary discussion between a materialist and the Anglican Bishop Butler, permits the bishop, who, by the way, is no favorite of ours, to press in substance this objection; but he takes good care not to attempt to solve it, yet he pretends to oppose the sciences to theology, and by science to explode spirit!
            The professor denies creation; and yet he adduces and can adduce no facts from which the denial of the origin of all things in creation is a logical induction. The induction transcends the domain of the sciences, transcends the order of second causes and is a hypothesis, conjecture, or guess in the order of the first cause or ultimate principles-anything but science. The professor himself dares not pretend that he has discovered and scientifically verified any facts that prove that there is no God; that the universe with all it contains has not been created from nothing; that there is no soul distinct from matter, the forma corporis, or that the soul is not immortal. The professor’s doctrine of materialism and pantheism or atheism is not, then, a scientific induction, and is not scientifically verified or verifiably. It is no more a scientific induction than is the assertion, the moon is made of green cheese. The objection here is, not that the professor cultivates the field of science and investigates the fats of nature, and classifies them according to the laws of their production and changes, or their generic principles in the order of second causes; but that he makes inductions or draws conclusions which he insists we shall receive as valid, and therefore as science, in the order of the first cause or ultimate principles; that is, his conclusions are broader than his premises, and in a different order, which is very bad logic, and certainly not very good science.
            We maintain that no induction from facts observed is of any scientific value beyond the order of the facts themselves. Hence we deny the validity of the argument from observation and induction for the existence of God as well as for the denial of that existence. We deny that the existence of God can be either proved or disproved by induction, and are as far from agreeing with Doctor M’Cosh as we are from agreeing with Professor Tyndall, Herbert Spencer, or Professor Fiske. We do not accept the teleological argument, or the argument from design, as of the least logical or scientific value, when taken independently, as we have shown in our “Essay in Refutation of Atheism,” under the head of “Inconclusive Proofs.” A certain class of theologians trained in the school of the Inductionists try to assimilate theology and philosophy to the physical sciences, and adopt for both the inductive method; but only to the destruction of both. God and creation can no more be proved than disproved by induction, which is of no value save in the order of facts, as Bacon himself maintained; and any induction from facts to be applied beyond the order of facts is an abstraction, a generalization, and, therefore, a sheer nullity.
            We have in our “Essay in Refutation of Atheism,” refuted Professor Tyndall’s atheism and his denial of creation, by proving, we venture to say, unanswerably, the being of God and the fact of creation. No man who denies either has any right to pretend to any real science of principles, or of the origin or end of things. The professor’s materialism needs no refutation, for no fact is adduced or can be adduced to prove it. It suffices to answer the professor, as the artist Fuseli answered a materialist in his day, who was arguing that man has no soul: “That you have a soul, I will not say; but by G—I know I have a soul.” If the professor believes that he has been evolved from the aphid, and differs not essentially from the pig, we see not much use in attempting to correct his belief. If he should discover that he has a soul he would hardly know what to do with it; it would be for him a great embarrassment, only disturb his serenity, and make him very discontented to lodge any longer in the sty with his brother pigs. He takes pride in belonging to “the sty of Epicurus,” and we are not sure that it is not the pigs that should resent the affinity claimed. One of the strangest things in the world is the find men, educated men, held in high esteem by the leaders of public opinion, who fancy they are laboring for the honor and dignity of human nature, the emancipation, the intellectual and moral elevation of the human race, by doing their best to degrade man to the level of the beasts that perish! And this, too, under pretext of delivering society from superstition, as if the worst possible superstition could be a deeper degradation, sink man lower in the scale of being, that their false and infamous theories would sink him, if true or acted on. Even the most loathsome African fetichism is less degrading than the doctrine of Professor Tyndall and Co.; for fetichism leaves to the human heart something to reverence held to be superior to man, while Tyndall and Co.’s doctrine leaves it nothing.
            But while we refuse to undertake a formal refutation of the materialism revived from old Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius, we may note and dispose of a few of the false charges the professor brings against the theologians. To read his Address, one would suppose that the sciences ad been opposed from the beginning by the theologians, and have had to fight their way at every step they have taken. Now we have been reading history all our lifetime, but we have found no evidence of this grave charge; and we challenge the professor to name an instance in which the theologians have opposed or hindered the study of nature. Socrates, we concede, was condemned to death, but not for his scientific doctrines, or his cultivation of the natural sciences, to high in his earlier life he appears to have been devoted. He was tried and condemned for his moral and theological teachings, which, imperfect as they were, were yet purer and far more elevated, because more in accordance with the primitive traditions of the race, than those held by the American state. Indeed, scientific culture received its first encouragement, unless all history is a fable, in the temples; the first developments off the sciences were due to the priests, and were continued in the heather world, for the most part, by the sacerdotal caste. To the sacerdotal caste the world owed the study of astronomy and mathematics, mechanics and physics, for a certain degree of knowledge of all these was necessary in the temple service; and it is doubtful if our knowledge of these has much advanced beyond theirs. The heathen mythologies, although they are in part susceptible of an historical explication, as old Evemerus maintained, yet only in part, and that a very small part, as the superstition common to them all is the worship of nature originating with the pantheists and the pseudo-philosophers, are to be explained chiefly by the facts and principles of natural science,-what the English call natural philosophy,-grouped around some prominent historical person or event together with some prominent historical person or event, together with some distorted or mutilated traditions of the primitive religion of mankind. Whoever studies them and is capable of comprehending them, will be struck with the profound knowledge of the natural sciences they conceal, or which must have been possessed by the sacerdotal corporations in which they originated.
The professor is ill-informed when he asserts that the ancient heathen attributed the origin of the phenomena, if he means the facts, of nature to the caprices of the gods, that is, to the direct creative act of the Divine Power. They did no such thing. The heathen ascribed no creative power to their gods, any more than Christians do to Satan and his angels. Even the heathen philosophers never recognize the fact of creation; they recognize no creative God. The Gentiles, of the nations and tribes that shortly after the confusion of tongues at Babel apostatized from the patriarchal religion, fell into idolatry, originated the various mythologies and superstitions of profane history, and completely lost the tradition of the fact of creation. The Gentile philosophers explained the origin things, as do still the Hindus, the Japanese, and Buddhists, by emanation, generation, formation, development, or evolution. Democritus did not differ from the other Greek philosophers in denying creation after a human manner, as the professor asserts, or in any other manner; but in practically denying all supernal or divine influence in the government of man and nature. He was a downright atheist, and explained the origin of things, the cosmos and its contents, by the blind workings of mechanical forces-by the mechanical and fortuitous combination of lifeless and senseless atoms. 
The professor is as enraged as a mad bull at sight of a red rag, at the bare mention of a personal cause, or personal causes, and he stigmatizes as anthropomorphous even Christian theology. He embraces, with all the affection of his heart, old Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius, and other materialists, because they reject all personal cause, and attribute all the facts and phenomena of nature to the workings of impersonal and blind force or energy, directed by no intelligence and moved by no will. His class of scientist, who write in English, do not like to say out bluntly, “There is no God,” for, adepts in hypocrisy, the English-speaking people would hardly bear that; so they soften it, and say, “There is no Personal or anthropomorphous God,” as if personal and anthropomorphous meant one and the same thing. But an impersonal God is simply no God at all; it is a simple force operating without intelligence, or reason and will, it is a person, and such, we have heretofore demonstrated, is God, the only living and eternal Being, SUM QUI SUM. But he is an infinitely free, independent, divine person, not a limited, finite, dependent human person. Anthropomorphous means human-shaped, and has nothing to do with personality or impersonality,; for, though the body has shape or figure, the person, that which says I am, I know, or I will has none. 
The Greeks represented their gods-not the Divinity which, in all mythology, hovers above all the gods, and holds in its hand the destinies of both gods and men- under a human form; but the Ægyptians, the Assyrians, and Hindus did not, except when it concerned an Avatar, or Incarnation of Vishnu or of some other god; nor did the Romans represent their gods as anthropomorphous, at least not until after they took to imitating the Greeks, who worshipped the beauty of form. The professor’s brother-materialist, the Mormons, make their God anthropomorphous. One of their twelve apostles explained to us one day their theology, according to which God is material, organized of the finest part of matter, and has the human shape or figure. The Swedenborgians give to their God the human form, the configuration and all the parts of a man. But the Christian theologians, though they assert the personality, even the tri-personality of the Godhead, never represent the Divinity as anthropomorphous, for they hold him to be without body or parts, that is, pure spirit. It is God in his human nature, the Eternal World Incarnate, assuming flesh and becoming truly man without ceasing to be God, that bears the human form. We do not expect the professor to understand anything of this, for the eyes of his understanding have remained closed for more than nine days, from his birth. We make the remarks for our Christian readers, not for him. 
According to the professor, science, that is, materialism, went on swimmingly from old Democritus, in spite of the shallow and feeble opposition of Plato and Aristotle, till it was interrupted by the rottenness and corruption of the Roman Empire, and the introduction and establishment of Christianity or ecclesiasticism suspended its culture and progress for nearly two millenniums. Christianity, which he calls ecclesiasticism, is the inveterate enemy, it would seem, of all scientific progress. Thus he says;- 
  “What, then, stopped its victorious advance? Why was the scientific intellect compelled, like an exhausted soul, to lie fallow for nearly two millennia before it could regather the elements necessary to its fertility and strength? Bacon has already let us know one cause; Whewell ascribes this stationary period to four causes, -Obscurity of thought, servility, intolerance of disposition, enthusiasm of temper; and he gives striking examples of each. 
 “But these characteristics must have had their causes, which lay in the circumstances of the time. Rome, and the other cities of the Empire, had fallen into moral putrefaction. Christianity had appeared, offering the Gospel to the poor, and, by moderation, if not asceticism of life, practically protesting against the profligacy of the age. The sufferings of the early Christians, and the extraordinary exaltation of mind which enabled them to triumph over the diabolical tortures to which they were subjected, must have left traces now easily effaced. They scorned the earth, in view of that ‘building of God, that house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.’ The Scriptures, which ministered to their spiritual needs, were also the measure of their science. When, for example, the celebrated question of antipodes came to be discussed, the Bible was with many the ultimate court of appeal. Augustine, who flourished A.D. 400, would not deny the rotundity of the earth, but 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 shocked 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. Later on, the political and theological strife between the Church and civil governments, so powerfully depicted by Draper, must have done much to stifle investigation. Whewell makes many wise and brave remarks regarding the spirit of the Middle Ages. It was a menial spirit. The seekers after natural knowledge had forsaken that fountain of living waters, the direct appeal to nature by observation and experiment, and had given themselves up to the remanipulation of the notions of their predecessors. It was a time when thought had become abject, and when the acceptance of mere authority led, as it always does in science, to intellectual death. Natural events, instead of being traced to physical, were referred to moral causes; while an exercise of phantasy, almost as degrading as the spiritualism of the present day, took the place of scientific speculation.” 
Professor Tyndall adds nothing to strengthen his cause by citing such authors as Whewell and Draper, who are no better authority than himself on the intellectual history of mankind. The historian who can characterize the period from the downfall of the Roman Empire in the sixth century to the sixteenth as a “stationary;” period, a period of “servility,” of abjectness, or intellectual inactivity, proves only his own ignorance of that period, and utter incapacity to write its history. There is no known period of history which less deserves the title of “stationary;” no one in which men have displayed greater physical energy, or a more marvelous moral and intellectual activity; or in which society has made in all directions such great and astonishing progress. That period, in which the Barbarians who had overturned the corrupt and rotten Roman Empire, which had grown into the most oppressive despotism that ever weighed on the human race, under which freemen, to escape the burden imposed by the imperial fisc, actually sold themselves and their children into slavery; were Christianized and civilized, and formed into the great and leading nations of the modern world, could not have been a stationary period; nor could it have been remarkable for its tameness and servility, especially when it is considered that the Protestant Revolt in the sixteenth century found every European state organized and with a free and vigorous constitution, which three hundred years, with a century of revolutions, have been able only partially to destroy. There can be no question that Europe was in possession of far greater political and civil freedom, as well as of a higher moral and intellectual culture, when Luther was born, than it is now, or has been since the rise of Protestantism. There is nothing witnessed now in the world to equal the enthusiasm of men in the Middle Ages for knowledge, and knowledge on all subjects. The curriculum of the schools was that of the great imperial schools of Rome, and was not less extensive than that of our most renowned contemporary universities. The scholars may have been inferior in purely literary grace and polish to the Ciceros, Virgils, Horaces, Sallusts, Livys, or the classical writers of Athens; but we hazard nothing when we say they were vastly superior to them in the breadth of their culture, the extent and variety of their knowledge, and in depth and vigor of though. The scholastics may have made many unnecessary distinctions, and spent much time in discussing questions which seem to us trifling or frivolous; but no one who has studied them can deny that no philosophers ever lived who also discussed so many really important questions, or discussed them so thoroughly and well. 
Undoubtedly, the mind was less taken up in those ages with the mechanical and physical sciences than with philosophical and theological sciences, in which are to be found the principles and law of the natural sciences; for in those ages men believed in revelation, in the immortality of the soul, and the reality of the spiritual world, and therefore placed the kingdom of heaven in their affections above the kingdoms of this world. But they did not neglect the study of the physical sciences, nor were they ignorant of the true method of studying them, that of observation and induction. Bacon’s pretense, that they adopted the a-priori method in the study of nature, has no foundation in fact. The recognized a first cause, causa causarum and did not consider natural facts and events were fully explained by being traced to their second causes; but nothing is farther from the truth than the rash assertion, that “ natural events, instead of being traced to physical, were referred to moral, causes.” The professor will search in vain to find a single instance to sustain him. Doubtless, the scholastics held, the rightly held, that the ultimately cause of all natural events is God, for so Christianity teaches; yet was this never so understood as to exclude or impair the action of physical or second causes. The error for scientists is, that they extend the action of second causes so far as to exclude or absorb the first cause, and make their physical causes supersede the moral cause of the universe. But the study of nature was by no means neglected; and many remarkable discoveries and inventions were made during that period which have changed the face of the modern world, and are the basis of the material progress we so loudly boast. It was in these same decried Middle Ages that gunpowder and fire-arms, paper and printing on movable types, and the mariner’s compass, were invented, the power of steam was discovered, and its use as a motive power foreseen and predicted. It was also in this period, this period of inactivity and “mental stagnation,” that occurred the remarkable travels of Marco Polo, and the geographical discoveries of Vasco da Gama and Christopher Columbus. The Period in which such inventions and discoveries were made, was not, assuredly, a period of mental inactivity and stupidity. 
Yet during all this period in which these inventions and discoveries were made, and this mighty progress in civilization was effected, ecclesiasticism was in the ascendant; and the Church, if often resisted and thwarted by the barbarianism inherited from the empire or introduced from the forests of Germany, if she found herself obliged to frequently to begin her work anew by the devastating irruptions of new hordes of barbarians from the East the South, and the North, Huns, Saracens, and Northmen, led society in its grand work of civilization, directed its labors, and rendered the efficient. Professor Tyndall applauds Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius in maintaining materialism, because their motive was to rid the world of superstition. Yet they did not rid the world of that fearful evil; and the world was never sunk deeper in superstition that it was at the moment when their doctrine, which the professor calls science, was most in vogue. The only remedy for superstition is the predominance in society of the true religion; and under the influence of mediæval ecclesiasticism, superstition had almost entirely disappeared from Christian Europe. 
Outside of the influence of ecclesiasticism there was really no scientific or other progress during the period in question; for even the professor will hardly claim as scientists the old alchemists, astrologers, and various classes of unchristian mystics: indeed he expressly excludes them. Yet they were not subjected to ecclesiastical authority which opposed them, and were as independent in their speculations as is the professor himself. Emancipation from ecclesiastical does not appear to insure scientific progress. The professor cites, indeed, the Arab Alhazen, of Spain, who would seem to be as true a scientist as Professor Tyndall himself, which is not saying much; for if his doctrine of materialism were true, his science would not surpass that of the ox or the horse. His account of the scientific progress of the Arabs rests on the authority of our own Dr. Draper, a good chemist for aught we know, and a passable physiologist, we believe, if we accept, as is the fashion just now, the chemical explanation of physiological facts; but, in historical matters, of no authority at all, as we had occasion to remark, when reviewing his works for the Catholic World. Whoever has studied the question knows perfectly well that the Middle Ages, widely credited and insisted on by those whose position requires them to depreciate the Church and her influence, have been grossly exaggerated. They had no philosophy, and very little, if any, science, except what they borrower from the Greeks and Hindus, conquered by the armies of the Prophet or his Lieutenants. 
The struggle between the Pope and Emperor, or between the spiritual power and the secular, had, no doubt, a disastrous effect on the scientific as well as the moral progress of the Middle Ages; but for that struggle Ecclesiasticism is not responsible. Who is ignorant, to-day, that the struggle originated in the encroachments of the secular power on the rights and independence of the spiritual, as we shall show in a subsequent article? In that long struggle, not yet ended, and renewed and rendered as fierce as ever to0day by Kaiser Wilhelm and his chancellor, Prince von Bismarck, whatever hindrances science had to encounter, must be charged, not to ecclesiasticism, but to cæsarism which warred against it. 
The pretense that the Church opposes, or ever has opposed, science or the study of the natural sciences, can be set up only by deplorable ignorance or satanic malice. The professor cites but the two facts, and they prove nothing to the purpose. They are, that St. Augustine and St. Boniface rejected the doctrine of the antipodes, which, in their time, was supposed to imply that there is a race of men not redeemed by the blood of Christ; which was not and could not be true. All that can be said of them is, that they, as well as those who asserted inhabitants on the other side of the earth, erred in supposing them necessarily separated from us. The church always leaves scientific questions to scientific en, even in enacting her own canons; astronomical questions to astronomers, mathematical questions to mathematicians, physiological questions to physiologists, chemical questions to chemists, and so on. When she would correct the calendar and determine the true time for keeping Easter, she relied on the calculations of astronomers and mathematicians; and every theologian knows that there are not a few questions in moral theology bearing on physiology, that are solved by the teachings of the physiologists, as in speculative theology purely rational questions are solved by the dicta of accredited philosophers. Every reader of the “sum” of St. Thomas will readily recollect the “dicit philosophus.” There is, as we have said, no quarrel between the theologians and scientists, so long as the scientists confine themselves to the proper domain of science, and do not, by their inductions, theories, and hypotheses, attempt to invade the territory of faith, or revealed theology. The quarrel begins only when they leave their own domain, and claim, in the name of science, the right to take charge of faith and morals. So long as they remain in their own legitimate sphere, they meet from the Church only honor and encouragement. 
We do not feel that it is necessary to follow this pretentious, but shallow, address any further. The author does not give us, nor even profess to give us, science; he gives simply his opinions, not in the field of science, but on faith and morals, and in opposition to the beliefs and hopes, individuals here and there excepted, of the human race in all ages and nations; and we tell him very frankly that he is not a man sufficiently learned or distinguished to make his opinions on the topics he introduces worthy of the slightest consideration. He has never seriously studied one of them; and his conclusions, as given in his Address, are in no instance the result of his own thorough scientific investigation. He cannot be consulted as an expert on one of them. The s Scriptures classify him when they say, “Dixit insipens in corde suo: Non est Deus.” We must say of him, still in the language of Scripture, “Ephraim is joined to his idols, let him alone.” He is wedded to his false science, and to it we leave him, praying God to have mercy on his soul. 
The Address , and the reception it has met from no small portion of the public, bear us put in the assertion we so frequently make, but which few appear to heed, that the living issue we have now to meet is between Catholicity and atheism. We have to meet it here in the form of independent morality, there in the form of cæsarism or independent politics. Secularism is only a polite name for atheism, and secularism is the enemy we have everywhere to fight, -secularism in education, secularism in science, secularism in religion, secularism in morals, in politics, in the family, and in society. “The Four Great Evils of the Times,” so minister, are only four phases of one and the same evil, namely, secularism or atheism, -the substitution of the creature for the Creator, man for God. 
In this war the sects, even though professing to recognize God and Christ, and to believe the grave, their belief is so uncertain and variable, so weak and timid, cannot aid us. One half of each sect never think –are, intellectually considered, mere nullities; the other half are asking, often in agony of soul, Whence come we, why are we here, whither go we, who will show us any good? Those among them who think, doubt; the problem of life rises dark and impenetrable before them, and despairing of a solution or of arriving at any tenable life-plan, they immerse themselves in business, in politics, or in pleasure –anything that stifles thought and memory. Then, they all start from an atheistic principle, that of PRIVATE JUDGEMENT. Private judgment assumes the sovereignty of the individual, that man is supreme; and the assumption of the supremacy of man, whither individually or collectively, is the denial of the sovereignty of God, and, therefore, of God himself. The logical development of the sectarian principle, or rule of private judgment, is pure atheism. How, then, can the sects aid us in combating the atheistic tendency of contemporary scientists? In the heat of battle they would turn against us, and fight on the side of the enemy. Do we not see that, in the estimation of the sects, a Catholic who apostatizes and turns atheist, is preferable to an Anglican even who turns Catholic? Does not this prove that the affinity of the sects with atheism is far closer than their affinity for Catholics? What, then, can be more preposterous than to suppose the sects can successfully combat, or aid in combating, atheism or the dominant secularism; or that they can maintain Christianity in its life and vigor? Indeed some of them have gone so far already as even to repudiate the Christian name, like our so-called Free Religionists.
This is what gives to Professor Tyndall’s Address its significance. In itself it is insignificant; but as following our the tendency of the non-Catholic world, or as the expression of the logical development of the principles held in common by all the sects and enemies of our Lord Jesus Christ, it becomes terribly significant. The secular press, if they do not openly indorse its abominable doctrines, are not shocked by them, and treat the professor himself with great tenderness and respect; the sectarian press combat his doctrines indeed, but so feebly, that one can hardly help suspecting them of being in secret league with him, and quite willing to yield him the victory. President M’Cosh of Princeton, the great gun of the Presbyterians, has come to an interviewer with a tremendous flourish against the professor, but concedes so much to the atheistic school, that he reserves nothing worth defending against it. Such a friend as he to religion, whither sincere or not, is practically worse than an open enemy.
No, we Catholics, with the help of God, must fight this battle alone; and we must bear in mind that it is not against Professor Tyndall, nor against any other single professor. We have to fight the secularism of the ages, the whole spirit and tendency of the entire non-Catholic world, and of not a few who are in the Church of God without being of it. Catholic watchmen cannot be permitted now to sleep at their posts. The citadel is assailed from all quarters by innumerable foes, some open and avowed, some invisible and unsuspected, even disguised as friends-the most to be dreaded of all. We must be vigilant, and constantly clad in armor, in the whole armor of God, as described by St. Paul. The greatest danger of the times does not come from without, but is in our own camp, and is in our own camp, and is to be found in the large numbers in our own ranks who place the national question above the Catholic question, although most of them will swear, and, perhaps, honestly believe, they do no such thing, and are willing to strike hands with the hereditary enemies of their faith, if they show a willingness to favor their national aspirations. We count these, whatever their nationality, the real enemies of the Catholic cause. The Church is Catholic, not national, and Christ can have no concord with Belial. If our human arm in this fight had to win the victory, we should despair. But ours is the cause of God, and he is on our side if we are faithful, and he will defeat and scatter our enemies.

Professor Tyndall’s Address

 

January, 1875

 

If any proof were wanted of the anti-Christian sentiments and tendencies of contemporary scientists, and the neglect of the higher branches of a thorough education, the general ignorance of the simplest elements of religion, and the fearful intellectual abasement, we might almost say intellectual imbecility, of the leaders of the age, we might find it in the fact that such an address as this by professor Tyndall could be delivered before an association of professedly scientific men, and when published should produce a profound impression, and be received with no little favor by the public opinion. The address, aside from a certain pomp of diction, an emphasis, and an air of superiority and assurance with which Englishmen usually conceal their ignorance and poverty of thought, has nothing remarkable about it. It contains nothing that we have not heard in substance over and over again, ad nauseam, from our very boyhood. We discover in it a passable rhetorician, but no logician, no thinker, no scholar, nr even an ordinarily well-informed gentleman, outside of certain of the special sciences, which he may have cultivated with more or less success. In regard to the subjects treated in this address, whatever he knows or thinks he knows, he has picked up at third of fourth hand; and in reality he know simply nothing, not even that he knows nothing of them, and only makes a fool of himself in the eyes of all who have studied them and really do know something of them. Yet John Tyndall is a great man, one of the demigods of the scientific world in this nineteenth century, the inventor of a smoke respirator!

                Before proceeding to any particular examination of this very pretentious, but really flimsy, Address itself, whose tinsel the public mistake for solid gold, we wish to call attention to an unwarrantable assumption with regard to the religious history of mankind, on which the author and his infidel brother-scientist base their theorizing on religion and theology. This assumption is, that the gross heathen superstitions were the earliest forms with which the religious sentiment clothed itself; and that the history of the developments, changes, and modifications these superstitions undergo from nation to nation and from age to age, presents the complete religious history of the race. Deprive them of this assumption, and all their theorizing on the subject of religion falls to the ground. Yet for this assumption there is not only not one particle of historical proof, but the direct and positive testimony of history to the contrary. History shows us the human race in possession of a pure and holy religion, the worship of the one living and true God, Creator of heaven and earth, before a single trace of any of these heathen superstitions is discoverable. These superstition sand one and all of them fruits of the great Gentile apostasy from the primitive and true religion; and their developments, changes, and modifications are due to the efforts of men and nations who have lost the true system of the universe, and find themselves without clothing or shelter in this wintry world, to construct out of their reminiscences and their own “inner Consciousness” some sort of covering for their nakedness, and some sort of protection from the winter’s blast, just as we see individuals and nations that have apostatized from Christ and protested against the Papacy, now doing. Having forsaken the Fountain of Living Waters they are fain “to hew out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that will hold no water.” The origin, developments, and changes of the heathen superstitions may be read in the origin, developments, and changes of your modern Protestant sects. The world outside of the Church traverses a circle, and ever and anon comes round to its starting-point, as does the poor lad who has lost his head in the woods. There is progress only in the Church; only in her does a man recover his lost head, and find his way home.

            Not only do our scientists take the history of the heathen superstitions for the history of religion, but they take the theology, to which they oppose their scientific deductions or inductions, from Protestant and theologians. The only class of scientists we have any acquaintance with, who give any indications even of the most superficial knowledge of Christian theology are the Positivists; and the speak of it, as of Christianity itself, with less disrespect than do the other classes of infidel scientist. There is little in Protestant theology that we can ourselves respect; and there can be no greater mistake, although it may recognize some fragments of Christian truth, than to confound it with Christian theology. Protestants theologians are floundering about to find truth as were the heathen philosophers, and are equally untrustworthy as guides, or as interpreters of the cosmos and religion. Even a victory of the scientists over Protestant theology would count for nothing with us. Professor Tyndall may batter away as much as he pleases against the Anglican Bishop Butler, for whom we have not and never had the least respect. We only pray the professor not to mistake the Anglican bishop for a Catholic theologian. His much praised “Analogy” is at best only a retort of the Deist’s silly objection, that Christian faith asserts incomprehensible mysteries: and the retort proves nothing. When the scientist wishes to attack Christianity, he should take an authentic statement of it, and aim his blows at the very heart of the Christian system, not at its mere accessories. Christianity is a whole and must be refuted as a whole, that is, in its principles, if refuted at all. Protestantism is not a whole, is only a jumble of fragments.

            But in turning to the Address itself, we are struck with its vagueness, indecision, and emptiness. It lacks method, distinctness of aim, and explicitness of doctrine. The orator seems to have a good deal of fighting him, but is not quite certain as to his enemy, or at what head he is to strike. He appears to be dealing fearful blows at some formidable, but invisible, foe; yet whether against a real foe or only a spectre of his own fancy, is more than we can determine. What he wants we know not, and what obstacles he encounters, or imagines he encounters, we see not; only this is certain, that he nowhere in his Address speaks as a scientist, in the proper sense of the term; but from beginning to end he is out of the field of science and in that of philosophy or theology, both of which he professes to despise, and of both of which he is as innocent of knowing anything as the child not yet born. He who opposes or tries to make away with philosophy and theology, is as much in their province as he who defends them. He treats of religion who seeks to overthrow it, no less than he who labors to vindicate it.

            The Address defies analysis. It has no unity, no principle, no thesis, which it labors to develop, elucidate, and defend; and it proves nothing but the orator’s ignorance, arrogance, and hostility to religion. It sets forth no scientific truth, but simply reproduces as science-and does not understand that-the old exploded theory of materialism, as taught by the heathen Democritus, and as subsequently held by Epicurus, and sung by Lucretius. He denies the soul and its immortality, and the existence of a supercosmic, intelligent, and creative God; that is, he says with “the fool in his heart, NON EST DEUS,”- there is no God: therefore “let us eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die.” This is all we have found in this marvelous Address, over which Professor Youmans, of the Popular Science Monthly, is in raptures, and even bewildered by the general favor with which it has been received. But the worthy professor mush be pardoned, for he does not know the difference between pantheism or atheism and theism, and believes fully that Herbert Spencer is not only a great philosopher, but a marvelously devout Christian!

            The N. Y. Herald calls upon the theologians to give Professor Tyndall’s utterances a serious refutation. But why should it make such a call, as if Tyndall had brought forward anything which the theologians have not refuted a hundred times over, any time during the last eighteen centuries? Then, who is this Professor Tyndall? What mighty claims has he to public consideration? In his own line, in some one or more of the special sciences, he may have been a successful student; but in this Address he is not treating any one of the special sciences; he is not in his own line of study, in which he has acquired whatever distinction he has attained to in the scientific world, but trenches on the province of the theologian, of which he knows nothing. Because he has some reputation in some of the physical sciences, has invented a smoke respirator, has he thereby proved his ability to instruct us in philosophy, in theology, theogony, cosmogony, or in sciences that lie entirely above his line, and on which his studies throw not a single ray of light? We let him answer for us: -

“When the human mind has achieved greatness and given evidence of extraordinary power in any domain, there is a tendency to credit it with similar power in all other domains. Thus theologians have found comfort and assurance in the thought that Newton dealt with the question of revelation, forgetful of the fact that the very devotion of his powers, through all the best ears of his life, to a totally different class of ideas, not to speak of any natural disqualifications, tended to render him less instead of more competent to deal with theological and historical questions.”

This is his own protest against his being cited as authority in the domain in which lies his Address. Whatever extraordinary power he may or may not have shown in some other domain, he has shown none in that; and, according to his own reasoning, his very studies have unfitted him, in some degree at least, to do it. We wish our scientists would heed Professors Tyndall’s admonition, and especially we wish that he had heeded it himself.

            Science, the Popular Science Monthly tells us, deals only with second causes, and leaves the First Cause to religion, or the theologians. This use of the term sciences, which the scientists affect, is in some degree censurable, and not warranted by the genius of our mother-tongue. It is a misnomer, for what is meant is not science in its unity and universality, but the sciences, sometimes called “the inductive sciences,” “the Exact sciences,” and sometimes “the physical sciences,” as distinguished from the mental and moral sciences, that is, from philosophical and theological science. What is meant to be asserted is, if we charitably suppose the scientists or physicists know what they mean, that the sciences treat only of second causes not First Cause, or of secondary, not of first, principles. We will accept this statement, which has Professor Youmans for its authority, supposes that there is a first cause, and that there are second causes. But second causes are and can only be created causes, since necessarily dependent on the First Cause; and if with Democritus, Empedocles, Epicurus, Lucretius, Herbert Spence, and Professor Tyndall, we deny creation, or that the First Cause is a creative God, there are and can be no second Causes, and, consequently, no science, for then there will be no subject for the sciences to treat. Somebody has said: “An atheist may be a geometrician; but if there were no God, that is, no Creator, there could be no geometry.”

            But, assigning to the sciences second causes as their domain, which we are told is all they claim, we assign them simply the observation and classification of facts; for second causes are themselves only facts, not real causes or principles, except in a relative and subordinate sense, since they are created and dependent on the First Cause, from whom they all hold all they are, can be, or do. They are causes only in relation to their own effects. They have no original or independent causative power, no proper creative force or energy, and can only explicate the potentialities of the productions of the First Cause, while, in relation to the First Cause, they are neither causes nor principles, but simply facts. As long as the scientists confine themselves to the investigation of facts and their classification according to their second causes or their generic principles, which, as being only secondary causes or their generic principles, which, as being only secondary r relative, are themselves in the order facts, they are in their proper domain; and philosophers, and even theologians who deal with first or absolute principles, will maintain them in it, respect and defend their rights and independence, and count them useful and even indispensable allies or auxiliaries. But the quarrel breaks out, not from the attempt of philosophy or theology to encroach on the domain of the sciences, or to construct them by a-priori reasoning, as Professor Tyndall falsely or ignorantly pretends; but from the persistence of the scientists to extend their inductions beyond the order of facts to the order of first principles, and thus to usurp the province of philosophy or theology.

            This is precisely what Professor Tyndall attempts in this Address before the British Association. He seeks to absorb the First Cause in the second, the primary in the secondary, principles in the facts which proceed from them, and are dependent on them. Thus he asserts materialism, that is, denies the spiritual element in man, and maintains that life, thought, feeling, love, and hatred, joy and grief, hope and fear, are produced by the mechanical combinations of material atoms, themselves without life, thought, or sense. This, of course is a mere theory, without the slightest scientific value, for it transcends the order of facts or of second causes. It is of no more value than the astronomer Lalande’s assentation, “I have never seen God at the end of my telescope.” Suppose you have not seen him, there is no God? Your conclusion is invalid; first because it is not in the order of facts, or in the order of your premises; and second, because, from a simple negation, nothing can be concluded. Professor Tyndall must show it possible for lifeless, senseless, brute matter to generate animal motion, life, sense, thought, reason, before he can assert his materialism, or the Democritan doctrine of the origin of life and sense in the mechanical, chemical, or electric combination of lifeless and senseless atoms. Ex nihilo nihil fit; to which it may be added that other axiom, Nemo dat quod non habet. You cannot in the compound get what is not in the components, as you can have in the whole only the sum of the parts. In your chemical compounds you get new forms, no doubt, but no new elements or substance, as every chemist is well aware. How, then, from your combinations of atoms, get what, confessedly, they do not contain? The professor, in his imaginary discussion between a materialist and the Anglican Bishop Butler, permits the bishop, who, by the way, is no favorite of ours, to press in substance this objection; but he takes good care not to attempt to solve it, yet he pretends to oppose the sciences to theology, and by science to explode spirit!

            The professor denies creation; and yet he adduces and can adduce no facts from which the denial of the origin of all things in creation is a logical induction. The induction transcends the domain of the sciences, transcends the order of second causes and is a hypothesis, conjecture, or guess in the order of the first cause or ultimate principles-anything but science. The professor himself dares not pretend that he has discovered and scientifically verified any facts that prove that there is no God; that the universe with all it contains has not been created from nothing; that there is no soul distinct from matter, the forma corporis, or that the soul is not immortal. The professor’s doctrine of materialism and pantheism or atheism is not, then, a scientific induction, and is not scientifically verified or verifiably. It is no more a scientific induction than is the assertion, the moon is made of green cheese. The objection here is, not that the professor cultivates the field of science and investigates the fats of nature, and classifies them according to the laws of their production and changes, or their generic principles in the order of second causes; but that he makes inductions or draws conclusions which he insists we shall receive as valid, and therefore as science, in the order of the first cause or ultimate principles; that is, his conclusions are broader than his premises, and in a different order, which is very bad logic, and certainly not very good science.

            We maintain that no induction from facts observed is of any scientific value beyond the order of the facts themselves. Hence we deny the validity of the argument from observation and induction for the existence of God as well as for the denial of that existence. We deny that the existence of God can be either proved or disproved by induction, and are as far from agreeing with Doctor M’Cosh as we are from agreeing with Professor Tyndall, Herbert Spencer, or Professor Fiske. We do not accept the teleological argument, or the argument from design, as of the least logical or scientific value, when taken independently, as we have shown in our “Essay in Refutation of Atheism,” under the head of “Inconclusive Proofs.” A certain class of theologians trained in the school of the Inductionists try to assimilate theology and philosophy to the physical sciences, and adopt for both the inductive method; but only to the destruction of both. God and creation can no more be proved than disproved by induction, which is of no value save in the order of facts, as Bacon himself maintained; and any induction from facts to be applied beyond the order of facts is an abstraction, a generalization, and, therefore, a sheer nullity.

            We have in our “Essay in Refutation of Atheism,” refuted Professor Tyndall’s atheism and his denial of creation, by proving, we venture to say, unanswerably, the being of God and the fact of creation. No man who denies either has any right to pretend to any real science of principles, or of the origin or end of things. The professor’s materialism needs no refutation, for no fact is adduced or can be adduced to prove it. It suffices to answer the professor, as the artist Fuseli answered a materialist in his day, who was arguing that man has no soul: “That you have a soul, I will not say; but by G—I know I have a soul.” If the professor believes that he has been evolved from the aphid, and differs not essentially from the pig, we see not much use in attempting to correct his belief. If he should discover that he has a soul he would hardly know what to do with it; it would be for him a great embarrassment, only disturb his serenity, and make him very discontented to lodge any longer in the sty with his brother pigs. He takes pride in belonging to “the sty of Epicurus,” and we are not sure that it is not the pigs that should resent the affinity claimed. One of the strangest things in the world is the find men, educated men, held in high esteem by the leaders of public opinion, who fancy they are laboring for the honor and dignity of human nature, the emancipation, the intellectual and moral elevation of the human race, by doing their best to degrade man to the level of the beasts that perish! And this, too, under pretext of delivering society from superstition, as if the worst possible superstition could be a deeper degradation, sink man lower in the scale of being, that their false and infamous theories would sink him, if true or acted on. Even the most loathsome African fetichism is less degrading than the doctrine of Professor Tyndall and Co.; for fetichism leaves to the human heart something to reverence held to be superior to man, while Tyndall and Co.’s doctrine leaves it nothing.

            But while we refuse to undertake a formal refutation of the materialism revived from old Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius, we may note and dispose of a few of the false charges the professor brings against the theologians. To read his Address, one would suppose that the sciences ad been opposed from the beginning by the theologians, and have had to fight their way at every step they have taken. Now we have been reading history all our lifetime, but we have found no evidence of this grave charge; and we challenge the professor to name an instance in which the theologians have opposed or hindered the study of nature. Socrates, we concede, was condemned to death, but not for his scientific doctrines, or his cultivation of the natural sciences, to high in his earlier life he appears to have been devoted. He was tried and condemned for his moral and theological teachings, which, imperfect as they were, were yet purer and far more elevated, because more in accordance with the primitive traditions of the race, than those held by the American state. Indeed, scientific culture received its first encouragement, unless all history is a fable, in the temples; the first developments off the sciences were due to the priests, and were continued in the heather world, for the most part, by the sacerdotal caste. To the sacerdotal caste the world owed the study of astronomy and mathematics, mechanics and physics, for a certain degree of knowledge of all these was necessary in the temple service; and it is doubtful if our knowledge of these has much advanced beyond theirs. The heathen mythologies, although they are in part susceptible of an historical explication, as old Evemerus maintained, yet only in part, and that a very small part, as the superstition common to them all is the worship of nature originating with the pantheists and the pseudo-philosophers, are to be explained chiefly by the facts and principles of natural science,-what the English call natural philosophy,-grouped around some prominent historical person or event together with some prominent historical person or event, together with some distorted or mutilated traditions of the primitive religion of mankind. Whoever studies them and is capable of comprehending them, will be struck with the profound knowledge of the natural sciences they conceal, or which must have been possessed by the sacerdotal corporations in which they originated.

The professor is ill-informed when he asserts that the ancient heathen attributed the origin of the phenomena, if he means the facts, of nature to the caprices of the gods, that is, to the direct creative act of the Divine Power. They did no such thing. The heathen ascribed no creative power to their gods, any more than Christians do to Satan and his angels. Even the heathen philosophers never recognize the fact of creation; they recognize no creative God. The Gentiles, of the nations and tribes that shortly after the confusion of tongues at Babel apostatized from the patriarchal religion, fell into idolatry, originated the various mythologies and superstitions of profane history, and completely lost the tradition of the fact of creation. The Gentile philosophers explained the origin things, as do still the Hindus, the Japanese, and Buddhists, by emanation, generation, formation, development, or evolution. Democritus did not differ from the other Greek philosophers in denying creation after a human manner, as the professor asserts, or in any other manner; but in practically denying all supernal or divine influence in the government of man and nature. He was a downright atheist, and explained the origin of things, the cosmos and its contents, by the blind workings of mechanical forces-by the mechanical and fortuitous combination of lifeless and senseless atoms. 

The professor is as enraged as a mad bull at sight of a red rag, at the bare mention of a personal cause, or personal causes, and he stigmatizes as anthropomorphous even Christian theology. He embraces, with all the affection of his heart, old Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius, and other materialists, because they reject all personal cause, and attribute all the facts and phenomena of nature to the workings of impersonal and blind force or energy, directed by no intelligence and moved by no will. His class of scientist, who write in English, do not like to say out bluntly, “There is no God,” for, adepts in hypocrisy, the English-speaking people would hardly bear that; so they soften it, and say, “There is no Personal or anthropomorphous God,” as if personal and anthropomorphous meant one and the same thing. But an impersonal God is simply no God at all; it is a simple force operating without intelligence, or reason and will, it is a person, and such, we have heretofore demonstrated, is God, the only living and eternal Being, SUM QUI SUM. But he is an infinitely free, independent, divine person, not a limited, finite, dependent human person. Anthropomorphous means human-shaped, and has nothing to do with personality or impersonality,; for, though the body has shape or figure, the person, that which says I am, I know, or I will has none. 

The Greeks represented their gods-not the Divinity which, in all mythology, hovers above all the gods, and holds in its hand the destinies of both gods and men- under a human form; but the Ægyptians, the Assyrians, and Hindus did not, except when it concerned an Avatar, or Incarnation of Vishnu or of some other god; nor did the Romans represent their gods as anthropomorphous, at least not until after they took to imitating the Greeks, who worshipped the beauty of form. The professor’s brother-materialist, the Mormons, make their God anthropomorphous. One of their twelve apostles explained to us one day their theology, according to which God is material, organized of the finest part of matter, and has the human shape or figure. The Swedenborgians give to their God the human form, the configuration and all the parts of a man. But the Christian theologians, though they assert the personality, even the tri-personality of the Godhead, never represent the Divinity as anthropomorphous, for they hold him to be without body or parts, that is, pure spirit. It is God in his human nature, the Eternal World Incarnate, assuming flesh and becoming truly man without ceasing to be God, that bears the human form. We do not expect the professor to understand anything of this, for the eyes of his understanding have remained closed for more than nine days, from his birth. We make the remarks for our Christian readers, not for him. 

According to the professor, science, that is, materialism, went on swimmingly from old Democritus, in spite of the shallow and feeble opposition of Plato and Aristotle, till it was interrupted by the rottenness and corruption of the Roman Empire, and the introduction and establishment of Christianity or ecclesiasticism suspended its culture and progress for nearly two millenniums. Christianity, which he calls ecclesiasticism, is the inveterate enemy, it would seem, of all scientific progress. Thus he says;- 

  “What, then, stopped its victorious advance? Why was the scientific intellect compelled, like an exhausted soul, to lie fallow for nearly two millennia before it could regather the elements necessary to its fertility and strength? Bacon has already let us know one cause; Whewell ascribes this stationary period to four causes, -Obscurity of thought, servility, intolerance of disposition, enthusiasm of temper; and he gives striking examples of each. 

 “But these characteristics must have had their causes, which lay in the circumstances of the time. Rome, and the other cities of the Empire, had fallen into moral putrefaction. Christianity had appeared, offering the Gospel to the poor, and, by moderation, if not asceticism of life, practically protesting against the profligacy of the age. The sufferings of the early Christians, and the extraordinary exaltation of mind which enabled them to triumph over the diabolical tortures to which they were subjected, must have left traces now easily effaced. They scorned the earth, in view of that ‘building of God, that house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.’ The Scriptures, which ministered to their spiritual needs, were also the measure of their science. When, for example, the celebrated question of antipodes came to be discussed, the Bible was with many the ultimate court of appeal. Augustine, who flourished A.D. 400, would not deny the rotundity of the earth, but 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 shocked 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. Later on, the political and theological strife between the Church and civil governments, so powerfully depicted by Draper, must have done much to stifle investigation. Whewell makes many wise and brave remarks regarding the spirit of the Middle Ages. It was a menial spirit. The seekers after natural knowledge had forsaken that fountain of living waters, the direct appeal to nature by observation and experiment, and had given themselves up to the remanipulation of the notions of their predecessors. It was a time when thought had become abject, and when the acceptance of mere authority led, as it always does in science, to intellectual death. Natural events, instead of being traced to physical, were referred to moral causes; while an exercise of phantasy, almost as degrading as the spiritualism of the present day, took the place of scientific speculation.” 

Professor Tyndall adds nothing to strengthen his cause by citing such authors as Whewell and Draper, who are no better authority than himself on the intellectual history of mankind. The historian who can characterize the period from the downfall of the Roman Empire in the sixth century to the sixteenth as a “stationary;” period, a period of “servility,” of abjectness, or intellectual inactivity, proves only his own ignorance of that period, and utter incapacity to write its history. There is no known period of history which less deserves the title of “stationary;” no one in which men have displayed greater physical energy, or a more marvelous moral and intellectual activity; or in which society has made in all directions such great and astonishing progress. That period, in which the Barbarians who had overturned the corrupt and rotten Roman Empire, which had grown into the most oppressive despotism that ever weighed on the human race, under which freemen, to escape the burden imposed by the imperial fisc, actually sold themselves and their children into slavery; were Christianized and civilized, and formed into the great and leading nations of the modern world, could not have been a stationary period; nor could it have been remarkable for its tameness and servility, especially when it is considered that the Protestant Revolt in the sixteenth century found every European state organized and with a free and vigorous constitution, which three hundred years, with a century of revolutions, have been able only partially to destroy. There can be no question that Europe was in possession of far greater political and civil freedom, as well as of a higher moral and intellectual culture, when Luther was born, than it is now, or has been since the rise of Protestantism. There is nothing witnessed now in the world to equal the enthusiasm of men in the Middle Ages for knowledge, and knowledge on all subjects. The curriculum of the schools was that of the great imperial schools of Rome, and was not less extensive than that of our most renowned contemporary universities. The scholars may have been inferior in purely literary grace and polish to the Ciceros, Virgils, Horaces, Sallusts, Livys, or the classical writers of Athens; but we hazard nothing when we say they were vastly superior to them in the breadth of their culture, the extent and variety of their knowledge, and in depth and vigor of though. The scholastics may have made many unnecessary distinctions, and spent much time in discussing questions which seem to us trifling or frivolous; but no one who has studied them can deny that no philosophers ever lived who also discussed so many really important questions, or discussed them so thoroughly and well. 

Undoubtedly, the mind was less taken up in those ages with the mechanical and physical sciences than with philosophical and theological sciences, in which are to be found the principles and law of the natural sciences; for in those ages men believed in revelation, in the immortality of the soul, and the reality of the spiritual world, and therefore placed the kingdom of heaven in their affections above the kingdoms of this world. But they did not neglect the study of the physical sciences, nor were they ignorant of the true method of studying them, that of observation and induction. Bacon’s pretense, that they adopted the a-priori method in the study of nature, has no foundation in fact. The recognized a first cause, causa causarum and did not consider natural facts and events were fully explained by being traced to their second causes; but nothing is farther from the truth than the rash assertion, that “ natural events, instead of being traced to physical, were referred to moral, causes.” The professor will search in vain to find a single instance to sustain him. Doubtless, the scholastics held, the rightly held, that the ultimately cause of all natural events is God, for so Christianity teaches; yet was this never so understood as to exclude or impair the action of physical or second causes. The error for scientists is, that they extend the action of second causes so far as to exclude or absorb the first cause, and make their physical causes supersede the moral cause of the universe. But the study of nature was by no means neglected; and many remarkable discoveries and inventions were made during that period which have changed the face of the modern world, and are the basis of the material progress we so loudly boast. It was in these same decried Middle Ages that gunpowder and fire-arms, paper and printing on movable types, and the mariner’s compass, were invented, the power of steam was discovered, and its use as a motive power foreseen and predicted. It was also in this period, this period of inactivity and “mental stagnation,” that occurred the remarkable travels of Marco Polo, and the geographical discoveries of Vasco da Gama and Christopher Columbus. The Period in which such inventions and discoveries were made, was not, assuredly, a period of mental inactivity and stupidity. 

Yet during all this period in which these inventions and discoveries were made, and this mighty progress in civilization was effected, ecclesiasticism was in the ascendant; and the Church, if often resisted and thwarted by the barbarianism inherited from the empire or introduced from the forests of Germany, if she found herself obliged to frequently to begin her work anew by the devastating irruptions of new hordes of barbarians from the East the South, and the North, Huns, Saracens, and Northmen, led society in its grand work of civilization, directed its labors, and rendered the efficient. Professor Tyndall applauds Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius in maintaining materialism, because their motive was to rid the world of superstition. Yet they did not rid the world of that fearful evil; and the world was never sunk deeper in superstition that it was at the moment when their doctrine, which the professor calls science, was most in vogue. The only remedy for superstition is the predominance in society of the true religion; and under the influence of mediæval ecclesiasticism, superstition had almost entirely disappeared from Christian Europe. 

Outside of the influence of ecclesiasticism there was really no scientific or other progress during the period in question; for even the professor will hardly claim as scientists the old alchemists, astrologers, and various classes of unchristian mystics: indeed he expressly excludes them. Yet they were not subjected to ecclesiastical authority which opposed them, and were as independent in their speculations as is the professor himself. Emancipation from ecclesiastical does not appear to insure scientific progress. The professor cites, indeed, the Arab Alhazen, of Spain, who would seem to be as true a scientist as Professor Tyndall himself, which is not saying much; for if his doctrine of materialism were true, his science would not surpass that of the ox or the horse. His account of the scientific progress of the Arabs rests on the authority of our own Dr. Draper, a good chemist for aught we know, and a passable physiologist, we believe, if we accept, as is the fashion just now, the chemical explanation of physiological facts; but, in historical matters, of no authority at all, as we had occasion to remark, when reviewing his works for the Catholic World. Whoever has studied the question knows perfectly well that the Middle Ages, widely credited and insisted on by those whose position requires them to depreciate the Church and her influence, have been grossly exaggerated. They had no philosophy, and very little, if any, science, except what they borrower from the Greeks and Hindus, conquered by the armies of the Prophet or his Lieutenants. 

The struggle between the Pope and Emperor, or between the spiritual power and the secular, had, no doubt, a disastrous effect on the scientific as well as the moral progress of the Middle Ages; but for that struggle Ecclesiasticism is not responsible. Who is ignorant, to-day, that the struggle originated in the encroachments of the secular power on the rights and independence of the spiritual, as we shall show in a subsequent article? In that long struggle, not yet ended, and renewed and rendered as fierce as ever to0day by Kaiser Wilhelm and his chancellor, Prince von Bismarck, whatever hindrances science had to encounter, must be charged, not to ecclesiasticism, but to cæsarism which warred against it. 

The pretense that the Church opposes, or ever has opposed, science or the study of the natural sciences, can be set up only by deplorable ignorance or satanic malice. The professor cites but the two facts, and they prove nothing to the purpose. They are, that St. Augustine and St. Boniface rejected the doctrine of the antipodes, which, in their time, was supposed to imply that there is a race of men not redeemed by the blood of Christ; which was not and could not be true. All that can be said of them is, that they, as well as those who asserted inhabitants on the other side of the earth, erred in supposing them necessarily separated from us. The church always leaves scientific questions to scientific en, even in enacting her own canons; astronomical questions to astronomers, mathematical questions to mathematicians, physiological questions to physiologists, chemical questions to chemists, and so on. When she would correct the calendar and determine the true time for keeping Easter, she relied on the calculations of astronomers and mathematicians; and every theologian knows that there are not a few questions in moral theology bearing on physiology, that are solved by the teachings of the physiologists, as in speculative theology purely rational questions are solved by the dicta of accredited philosophers. Every reader of the “sum” of St. Thomas will readily recollect the “dicit philosophus.” There is, as we have said, no quarrel between the theologians and scientists, so long as the scientists confine themselves to the proper domain of science, and do not, by their inductions, theories, and hypotheses, attempt to invade the territory of faith, or revealed theology. The quarrel begins only when they leave their own domain, and claim, in the name of science, the right to take charge of faith and morals. So long as they remain in their own legitimate sphere, they meet from the Church only honor and encouragement. 

We do not feel that it is necessary to follow this pretentious, but shallow, address any further. The author does not give us, nor even profess to give us, science; he gives simply his opinions, not in the field of science, but on faith and morals, and in opposition to the beliefs and hopes, individuals here and there excepted, of the human race in all ages and nations; and we tell him very frankly that he is not a man sufficiently learned or distinguished to make his opinions on the topics he introduces worthy of the slightest consideration. He has never seriously studied one of them; and his conclusions, as given in his Address, are in no instance the result of his own thorough scientific investigation. He cannot be consulted as an expert on one of them. The s Scriptures classify him when they say, “Dixit insipens in corde suo: Non est Deus.” We must say of him, still in the language of Scripture, “Ephraim is joined to his idols, let him alone.” He is wedded to his false science, and to it we leave him, praying God to have mercy on his soul. 

The Address , and the reception it has met from no small portion of the public, bear us put in the assertion we so frequently make, but which few appear to heed, that the living issue we have now to meet is between Catholicity and atheism. We have to meet it here in the form of independent morality, there in the form of cæsarism or independent politics. Secularism is only a polite name for atheism, and secularism is the enemy we have everywhere to fight, -secularism in education, secularism in science, secularism in religion, secularism in morals, in politics, in the family, and in society. “The Four Great Evils of the Times,” so minister, are only four phases of one and the same evil, namely, secularism or atheism, -the substitution of the creature for the Creator, man for God. 

In this war the sects, even though professing to recognize God and Christ, and to believe the grave, their belief is so uncertain and variable, so weak and timid, cannot aid us. One half of each sect never think –are, intellectually considered, mere nullities; the other half are asking, often in agony of soul, Whence come we, why are we here, whither go we, who will show us any good? Those among them who think, doubt; the problem of life rises dark and impenetrable before them, and despairing of a solution or of arriving at any tenable life-plan, they immerse themselves in business, in politics, or in pleasure –anything that stifles thought and memory. Then, they all start from an atheistic principle, that of PRIVATE JUDGEMENT. Private judgment assumes the sovereignty of the individual, that man is supreme; and the assumption of the supremacy of man, whither individually or collectively, is the denial of the sovereignty of God, and, therefore, of God himself. The logical development of the sectarian principle, or rule of private judgment, is pure atheism. How, then, can the sects aid us in combating the atheistic tendency of contemporary scientists? In the heat of battle they would turn against us, and fight on the side of the enemy. Do we not see that, in the estimation of the sects, a Catholic who apostatizes and turns atheist, is preferable to an Anglican even who turns Catholic? Does not this prove that the affinity of the sects with atheism is far closer than their affinity for Catholics? What, then, can be more preposterous than to suppose the sects can successfully combat, or aid in combating, atheism or the dominant secularism; or that they can maintain Christianity in its life and vigor? Indeed some of them have gone so far already as even to repudiate the Christian name, like our so-called Free Religionists.

This is what gives to Professor Tyndall’s Address its significance. In itself it is insignificant; but as following our the tendency of the non-Catholic world, or as the expression of the logical development of the principles held in common by all the sects and enemies of our Lord Jesus Christ, it becomes terribly significant. The secular press, if they do not openly indorse its abominable doctrines, are not shocked by them, and treat the professor himself with great tenderness and respect; the sectarian press combat his doctrines indeed, but so feebly, that one can hardly help suspecting them of being in secret league with him, and quite willing to yield him the victory. President M’Cosh of Princeton, the great gun of the Presbyterians, has come to an interviewer with a tremendous flourish against the professor, but concedes so much to the atheistic school, that he reserves nothing worth defending against it. Such a friend as he to religion, whither sincere or not, is practically worse than an open enemy.

No, we Catholics, with the help of God, must fight this battle alone; and we must bear in mind that it is not against Professor Tyndall, nor against any other single professor. We have to fight the secularism of the ages, the whole spirit and tendency of the entire non-Catholic world, and of not a few who are in the Church of God without being of it. Catholic watchmen cannot be permitted now to sleep at their posts. The citadel is assailed from all quarters by innumerable foes, some open and avowed, some invisible and unsuspected, even disguised as friends-the most to be dreaded of all. We must be vigilant, and constantly clad in armor, in the whole armor of God, as described by St. Paul. The greatest danger of the times does not come from without, but is in our own camp, and is in our own camp, and is to be found in the large numbers in our own ranks who place the national question above the Catholic question, although most of them will swear, and, perhaps, honestly believe, they do no such thing, and are willing to strike hands with the hereditary enemies of their faith, if they show a willingness to favor their national aspirations. We count these, whatever their nationality, the real enemies of the Catholic cause. The Church is Catholic, not national, and Christ can have no concord with Belial. If our human arm in this fight had to win the victory, we should despair. But ours is the cause of God, and he is on our side if we are faithful, and he will defeat and scatter our enemies.