E-text prepared by Clare Boothby, Martin Pettit,
and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
(/)
AND
London:
MACMILLAN AND CO.
1870.
LONDON
R. CLAY, SONS, AND TAYLOR, PRINTERS,
BREAD STREET HILL.
My dear Tyndall,
I should have liked to provide this collection of "Lay Sermons,Addresses, and Reviews," with a Dedication and a Preface. In the former,I should have asked you to allow me to associate your name with thebook, chiefly on the ground that the oldest of the papers in it is agood deal younger than our friendship. In the latter, I intended tocomment upon certain criticisms with which some of these Essays havebeen met.
But, on turning the matter over in my mind, I began to fear that aformal dedication at the beginning of such a volume would look like agrand lodge in front of a set of cottages; while a complete defence ofany of my old papers would simply amount to writing a new one—a labourfor which I am, at present, by no means fit.
The book must go forth, therefore, without any better substitute foreither Dedication, or Preface, than this letter; before concluding whichit is necessary for me to notify you, and any other reader, of two orthree matters.
The first is, that the oldest Essay of the whole, that "On theEducational Value of the Natural History Sciences," contains a view ofthe nature of the differences between living and not-living bodies outof which I have long since grown.
Secondly, in the same paper, there is a statement concerning the methodof the mathematical sciences, which, repeated and expanded elsewhere,brought upon me, during the meeting of the British Association atExeter, the artillery of our eminent friend Professor Sylvester.
No one knows better than you do, how readily I should defer to theopinion of so great a mathematician if the question at issue werereally, as he seems to think it is, a mathematical one. But I submit,that the dictum of a mathematical athlete upon a difficult problem whichmathematics offers to philosophy, has no more special weight, than theverdict of that great pedestrian Captain Barclay would have had, insettling a disputed point in the physiology of locomotion.
The genius which sighs for new worlds to conquer beyond that surprisingregion in which "geometry, algebra, and the theory of numbers melt intoone another like sunset tints, or the colours of a dying dolphin," maybe of comparatively little service in the cold domain (mostly lighted bythe moon, some say) of philosophy. And the more I think of it, the moredoes our friend seem to me to fall into the position of one of those"verständige Leute," about whom he makes so apt a quotation from Goethe.Surely he has not duly considered two points. The first, that I am in noway answerable for the origination of the doctrine he criticises: andthe second, that if we are to employ the terms observation, induction,and experiment, in the sense in which he uses them, logic is as much anobservational, inductive, and experimental science as mathematics; andthat, I confess, appears to me to be a reductio ad absurdum of hisargument.
Thirdly, the essay "On the Physical Basis of Life" was intended tocontain a plain and untechnical statement of one of the great tendenciesof modern biological thought, accompanied by a protest, from thephilosophical side, against what is commonly called Materialism. Theresult of my well-meant efforts I find to be, that I am generallycredited with having invented "protoplasm" in the interests of"mater