McCOSH ON TYNDALL From The Nation, April 22, 1875. ⁵⁵

Among the natural consequences of the sin committed by Professor Tyndall in the hardihood of his late Belfast address, is the revival by it of the inextinguishable flame of metaphysical controversy. That the address was not fit, in the nature of things—to say nothing of the conventions, the common or unwritten laws of scientific societies, which the author violated— appears by the consequence that the most fitting reply to it comes from Dr. McCosh. “Ideas in Nature overlooked by Dr. Tyndall: being an Examination of Dr. Tyndall's Belfast Address. By James McCosh, D. D., LL. D.” 1875. “The Scottish Philosophy, Biographical, Expository, Critical, from Hutcheson to Hamilton. By James McCosh, LL. D., D. D.” 1875. ⁵⁶ Such popular organizations as the British Association for the Advancement of Science were copied from the aims and disciplines of the élite among modern scientific societies. These societies are, in a word, schools of Baconism, designed to embody all that was of value in the thought and spirit of Bacon—namely, a protest against traditional authority in science, with, of course, a recommendation of induction and of the inductive sciences for their value in the arts of life. As to method in induction, Bacon’s teaching was of comparatively little value. His really distinguishing service was in accomplishing a more or less complete and enduring severance, at least in British thought, of physical science from scholastic philosophy, and from all traditions of more ancient thought. One of the most interesting consequences of this movement is that the word “philosophy,” and even the name “natural philosophy,” have distinctly different meanings in English and in the continental languages. The body of ancient traditional thought was so completely routed that its name,

Philosophy, lost its meaning, and became appropriated to the knowledge and pursuits which in ancient times divine philosophy disdained. Socrates, it is said, brought down philosophy from the clouds; and Continental thinkers have reproached the English for having degraded her to the kitchen. This recognition of the dignity of the useful and of the authority of induction, but still more the subtler perceptions of method in induction by later English thinkers, and especially in the Positivism of Locke, Newton, Herschel, and J. S. Mill, have more than anything else given the English their eminence in modern science. The restraints of the speculative spirit in scientific pursuits, determined mainly by a desire for peace with Theology and Philosophy, and accomplished by a division of provinces, have been the chief cause of the easy triumphs of inductive evidences in the modern sciences of physics, astronomy, chemistry, and even geology and biology, over an opposition which, when roused, has carried with it the strength of a desperate self-defense and all the gigantic forces of tradition. The best British thinkers, therefore, from Newton to Darwin, have respected this peace; and Dr. Tyndall has put himself out of this category by the performance that relegates him to the tender mercies of Dr. McCosh.

As spectators of the combat, we may, however, forget the rash occasion which brought our scientific hero into this arena, and extend a sympathy to him in this relation which we withheld from him as the retiring president of the British Association. In the prefaces to his published address, Tyndall charges some of his critics with “a spirit of bitterness which desires, with a fervor inexpressible in words, my eternal ill.” Dr. Mc- Cosh “happens to know of some of them, that they are praying for him, in all humility and tenderness, that he and all others who have come under his influence may be kept from all evil, temporal and eternal.” Such belligerent magnanimity must be very consoling to its object. To be prayed for particularly by fellow-mortals that we may be delivered from deliberately cherished, or at least seriously considered, views on the nature of things, and not alone for what we ourselves recognize as evils, may be from a sympathy with a supposed unconscious.

undeveloped better-self in us; but to us, our conscious selves, it seems scarcely different, except in degree, from a sympathy and a wish for our eternal welfare which would burn us at the stake. Indeed, the attitude is not very unlike that of picking up the fagots for a spiritual cremation, of which the material symbol is now forbidden by civilized opinion and law. To use the language of kindliness and magnanimity when every page manifests an intense, though smothered, odium theologicum, conceals nothing, and repels more effectively than the most open hostility. Expressions of petty spite, depreciatory epithets, intimations of ill-opinion, readiness to credit evil reports of those who hold unorthodox opinions in philosophy, and misinterpretations of every sign of weakness in them— these characterize Dr. McCosh’s treatment of those thinkers, included in his latest published biographies of Scottish philosophers, who differ from him in fundamental views. If his object—supposing him to have an object in this—were simply to frighten the faithful from any contact with the unholy, we can see how he might effectively keep them faithful through ignorance; but if he thinks in this way to win any one to his standard, we think he greatly mistakes the nature of the sceptic. He calls attention in his preface to the fact “that in this paper, under none of its forms, have I charged Professor Tyndall with being an atheist”; and near the close of his paper he announces that “I make no inquiry into the personal beliefs of Dr. Tyndall,” though in the preface he had professed to believe that Tyndall’s feelings are not fixedly bad: “At present very wavering and uncertain—feelings, rather than convictions founded on evidence.” Dr. McCosh here makes use of the “extenuating method,” the eironeia of Aristotle’s rhetoric, though with ineffective art. His restraint from this fearful accusation is made up for by a zeal going greatly beyond due accuracy of thought and exposition, in his preparation of the case for whosoever may thereby be stimulated to prefer the charge.

We have space only for the examination of one great confusion of thought which runs through not only this paper but much of the criticism in his biographical work on the “Scottish Philosophy,” wherever he treats of the opinions of the “sceptics” of his native land.

Lord Bacon is Dr. McCosh’s model in philosophizing, and however marked may be the differences, there is a striking similarity between their minds. The great point of sympathy is in Bacon’s demonstrative, aggressive, and rather effusive professions of theism. This wins for Bacon the enthusiasm of such a disciple for “the comprehensiveness of his mighty mind”; and is likewise the measure with Dr. McCosh of the minds which he treats favorably in his biographies. Now, Bacon in his model inquiry which occupies so large a space in the “Novum Organum,”—the inquiry into the form of heat,— reaches the conclusion that heat is a kind of motion; meaning, of course, not the feeling of heat, but the conditions of the feeling. Dr. McCosh would be the last to charge Bacon with atheism for this verbal ellipsis. Nor do we suppose that he would be alarmed by the confusing ambiguities of the words light, sound, taste, touch, and the like, which are used by all modern philosophers to express two totally dissimilar natures, the tremors of ether and air, with the chemical and mechanical properties of bodies in contact with special organs of sense, and the sensations of light, sound, etc., of which these homonymical words are also the names; a part of the cause and its effect having the same names though wholly different in nature. Nor again do we suppose that he would take alarm at the inclusion, in such names, of the other physical conditions of a conscious product or sensation—namely, the movements or changes in living nervous tissues, which are the more immediate conditions of the production of a sensation. Mr. J. S. Mill, however, in his “Logic,” takes to task a philosopher of his own school for defining an idea or notion as “a contraction, motion, or configuration of the fibres which constitute the immediate organ of sense.” “Our notions” Mill exclaims, “a configuration of fibres! What kind of philosopher must he be who thinks that a phenomenon is defined to be the conditions on which he supposes it to depend?” What sort of philosopher must this one be, we may add, who not only makes this confusion in his imputations of opinion to scientific philosophers, ancient and modern, but intimates that the gravest defects not only of mind but of character are implied by it?

The poverty of philosophical language, rather than such fatuity, would have been the more charitable account of what is charged as materialism against these thinkers. No philosopher of note among them, we are sure, ever seriously thought that atoms by their collocations and movements explain (in the sense of unfolding the essential natures of) “sensation, judgment, reason; of love, passion, resolution.” None ever attempted, as Dr. McCosh intimates that Tyndall has done, to “account in this way for the affection of a mother for her son, of a patriot for his country, of a Christian for his Saviour.” No one ever supposed that, “aggregate them [the atoms] as you choose, and let them dance as they will,” there is “any power in them to generate [in the sense of producing their like] the fancies of Shakespeare—his Hamlet, his Lady Macbeth, his King Lear—the sublimities of Milton, the penetration of Newton, or the moral grandeur of the death of Socrates.” Yet Dr. McCosh calls Tyndall to account for so doing in these grave terms: “What—to employ the very mildest form of rebuke— can be the use of devising hypotheses which have not even the semblance of explaining the phenomena? In the interest of science, not to speak of religion, it is of moment at this present time to lay an arrest on such rash speculations; and to insist on the scientific men refraining from what Bacon denounces as ‘anticipations of nature’ and confining themselves to facts and the co-ordination of facts.”

Dr. McCosh is not quite accurate here about what his model Bacon recommends. The past errors which Bacon opposed he called “the Anticipations of Nature” by the mind, and in place of this recommended “the Interpretation of Nature,” or “that which is properly deduced from things,” and (it is to be presumed) may include somewhat more than a bare co-ordination of facts. But whatever Bacon meant to “denounce,” it is certain that the physical sciences which have grown up since his time involved in their establishment a great deal more of “the picturing power of the mind,” which Tyndall justly esteems, than Dr. McCosh is inclined to allow. But this is a comparatively trivial error. The gravamen of his charge is wholly mistaken. Tyndall publishes as an appendix to his address

a lecture previously delivered, in which the doctrine thus imputed to him is disavowed. Dr. McCosh refers to this fact, but regards it as either trivial or as inconsistent with the ominous meaning of that discovery in matter of “the promise and potency of every quality of life” for the “confession” of which Tyndall “abandons all disguise.” In spite of this lecture Dr. McCosh thinks that Tyndall “feels himself entitled to hold that matter, though we cannot say how, may give us all the operations of understanding and will.” It is important to understand here in what sense “may give us” is to be taken. Certainly Tyndall is no disciple of Lucretius, or of the great and subtle Greek physicists, if he holds that atoms, the primordia, the elements, the seeds, or first-beginnings of things have the natures of understanding and will. That these are not the properties, but only the accidents (in the logical sense), of the movements and collocations of the elements, is the Lucretian doctrine. Moreover, “primordial elements” does not refer to remoteness in time past, but to simplicity and unchangeableness in present, past, future, or the infinitely enduring causes of change. In other words, what these philosophers sought to explain by their theory of atoms is not the natures of the passing phenomena of sense, understanding, and will, but their occurrences, and the order (such as there is) in their occurrences as actualities or events. Such phenomena were not regarded as consisting of the properties of atoms, of size, weight, movement; but only as depending for their actual manifestation on certain elemental collocations and movements. Modern physiology is in striking accordance with these vague speculations. It does not, neither did they, affirm that the properties of matter (that is, the permanent and universal natures of matter) define or determine anything except the events of phenomena. Neither were the gods excluded by these speculations from existence, or from the moral interests and regards of men, in accordance with their reputed characters. They were only excluded from the arbitrary determination of the course of events, or from any other interference than that of being in their consciousness and actions a part of this course. They, too, were dependent in their thoughts and volitions on material conditions. Whatever loss of dignity or wound to pride in men might come from such subjection to material conditions was shared, according to this philosophy, by the gods. That the conditions of the nervous tissues which we vaguely describe as health, wakefulness, and vigor are a sum of material conditions, which occurring along with other material conditions around them determine particular perceptions, thoughts, and volitions as mental events, is a modern form of the same doctrine. This does not involve, however, the kind of explanation that Dr. McCosh appears to suppose.

There are two meanings of the word “explanation,” or, rather, two kinds of explanation involved in philosophy, the confounding of which, not by Dr. McCosh alone, but by nearly all the hostile critics of ancient and modern physical philosophy, has led to great confusion and injustice. To know the conditions of the occurrence of anything in such sort that we may predict this occurrence, whenever and wherever these conditions are given, though as phenomena these conditions may be in their natures wholly unlike the effects of them, is one mode of explanation. To presume this mode to be applicable to relations of any nature in which the conditions and phenomena are too complicated to be fully known or used for prediction, is to make speculative employment of it. To be able to analyze or decompose a phenomenon or effect into its constituents is another mode; whether or not we are able by combining the two modes, as in the dynamical sciences, to explain an effect as the sum of the several effects of the constituents of its cause. This most perfect kind of explanation, this combination, is reached only in dynamical science, and was never pretended to by the clear-headed Greeks who speculated so widely on the nature of things. That mental events and their combinations are fully conditioned, as events, on material ones is all that they ever pretended to believe; and in this opinion most modern physiologists agree with them. These philosophers have fared hard at the hands of the aggressive theists, their expounders and critics. Thus Bacon, as quoted by Dr. McCosh, says: “Even that school which is most accused of atheism doth the most demonstrate religion, that is, the school of Leucippus

and Democritus and Epicurus. For it is a thousand times more credible that four mutable elements and one immutable fifth essence, duly and eternally placed, need no God, than that an army of infinite small portions or seeds unplaced should have produced this order and beauty without a divine marshal.” Bacon here implicitly attributes to the ancient physicists that conception of their opponent Anaxagoras, which may be said to be the foundation of the philosophical theism of all subsequent times. It is common to speak of Anaxagoras as having introduced into the philosophy of nature the nous, or the independent agency of intelligence. It is not so commonly seen that he introduced along with this, and in antithesis to it, a still more characteristic idea, that of a primeval chaos. The anti- -chaotic nous of Anaxagoras is not that of the physicists and the pantheists. The only chaos contemplated by the ancient atomists is the one they saw around them always existing; one which had always existed in the indeterminate confused actual order, at any time, of the universe as a whole. Its particular orders were regarded as accidents; that is, not permanent or inherent properties of the elements. This last conception, by the way, has been grossly abused, accident being interpreted to mean an absolutely undetermined event; an Anaxagorean accident, such as might have happened in that primeval chaos, which the atomists did not believe in, when “all things were in a confused heap,” and before “nous intervened to set them in order.” That “things might all have been such that there was no fitness in them, and the most unfit might have survived,” is the reason Dr. McCosh gives for “discovering an ordinance of intelligence and benevolence in the very circumstance that there is a fitness, and that the fit survive.” So deeply imbedded in his intelligence is this conception, this essential idea of theism, the primeval chaos, that because he can conceive an altogether undemonstrable condition of things to have been possible, he postulates as actual a cause, or a mode of action in a cause, the nous, which would have defeated this possibility—a very common and almost unconscious kind of a priori argument.

It thus appears that Dr. McCosh, not less than Professor Tyndall, “crosses the boundary of the experimental evidence,”

and “revels in hypotheses about world-making and world ending.” He “professes,” indeed, to found his convictions in a Baconian way on “inductions,” the name he gives (without adequately explaining the process) to what most other modern thinkers call, and try to explain by the name, “intuitions a priori.” In this Dr. McCosh has doubtless confounded the effect of repeated assertions and professions of belief with the force in producing universal beliefs of invariably repeated particular experiences—an effect enforced by that modern factitious moral obligation, “the duty of belief”; a duty which though urged upon us by modern religious teachers with respect to certain ancient speculations, as of Anaxagoras, Socrates, and Plato, was far from being felt or admitted by these great teachers. Their service to us was in teaching how rather than what to think and believe.

A singular mistake for one who has undertaken to classify modern thinkers is committed by Dr. McCosh when he makes Comte the founder of the school to which Tyndall, Spencer, Huxley, Bain, and even Mr. Darwin are assigned. Two of these thinkers—Spencer and Huxley—have publicly disavowed and disproved any obligations to Comte. It would be cruel, if it were not absurd, to make Comte and Mill responsible, as Dr. McCosh does, even in the slightest degree, for the free use of hypotheses in science made by these thinkers, and especially the use made by the cosmologists among them, by Spencer and Tyndall, of hypotheses for “crossing the boundary of the experimental evidence.” Comte all his life, and Mill until late in life, resisted even the undulatory theory of light, as involving the unverifiable hypothesis of a medium, though most physicists, even in Comte’s lifetime, admitted the probability of the theory which is now universally adopted. It is strange to see the use of hypotheses in physical inquiries attributed to Mill’s recommendation, as it is by Dr. McCosh. As well might one attribute the invention and recommendation of reasoning to Aristotle! Mill only systematized, in his “Logic,” what physicists from Galileo had been constantly doing; and no one at all conversant with mathematical and experimental researches is ignorant of the fact that the use of hypotheses, as “recommended

by Mill,” is indispensable in that “interpretation of nature” which Bacon recommends. But these hypotheses are, for the most part, trial-questions—interrogations of nature; they are scaffoldings which must be taken down, as they are succeeded by the tests, the verifications of observation and experiment; they form no part of the finished structure of experimental philosophy. Comte and Mill, least of all among modern thinkers, recommend their use as bridges for “crossing the boundary of the experimental evidence,” whether by the Lucretian road with Tyndall, or on the Anaxagorean highway with McCosh.