WITH REFERENCES TO PHASES OF RECENT SCIENCE, PAPER READ BEFORE THE ALBANY INSTITUTE, FEBRUARY 2, 1875. BY ALEXANDER WINCHELL, LL.D., PROFESSOR OF GEOLOGY, ZOOLOGY AND BOTANY IN THE SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY. ALBANY : J. MUNSELL, 82 STATE STREET. sm 1875. THOUGHTS ON CAUSALITY. When I was in London, last July, I received an invitation to participate in the approaching Belfast meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Had I known that the occasion was to be signalized by some of the most notable utterances of the century, I might have resisted the strong pressure which was urging me to the continent. As it was, I went from London to the Alps while Tyndall proceeded from the Alps to London. The latter, as president of the British Association, delivered an address, the noise of which reached me at Chamonix. It is only since my return to America, however, that I have had the opportunity to learn precisely what the great physicist uttered, and how considerable a commotion it occasioned in the newspapers of this country. The gathering to which I refer was the scene of other notable utterances from a scientist no less distinguished and no less worthy of distinction. The two addresses, of Tyndall and Huxley, exemplify well a characteristic of recent science which, by many, has been deplored as a tendency to positivism and consequential materialism. To these two productions I might add two recent and powerful works by Haeckel of Jena, the latest of which has also fallen into my hands since my return to America. I refer to Haeckel's Natural History of Creation1 and his Anthropogeny." 1Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, 4te Verbesserte Auflage, Berlin, 1873. 8vo, pp. 688. 2 Anthropogenie. 1874. 8vo, pp. 732. Entwickelungsgeschichte des Menschen. Leipzig, In studying these latest emanations from the evolutionist school of science, I have been deeply impressed by four observations. 1. The great learning and scientific acumen of their authors. 2. Their strict adherence to the study of material phenomena, and their customary reticence upon questions which receive no direct light from physical observations. 3. The wide spread popular misapprehension of these men in respect to the subjects of their reticence, and of the bearing of their scientific opinions upon those subjects. 4. The existence of latent fallacies affecting in common, to some extent, many of their fundamental positions. With the view of eliciting into prominence the common fundamental principles of such writers, and applying to them what I believe to be correct philosophic criteria of universal thinking, I begin by presenting the line of reasoning embodied in the address of Professor Tyndall. This address is a panoramic survey of the history of thought and speculation on the origin and substratum of phenomena, and concludes that, so far as the inquiries of science are concerned, there has always been manifest a tendency, in leading minds, to rest, as an ultimate datum, upon the proposition that atoms and molecules exist, and their interaction is the cause of all material and mental phenomena, yet the author repeatedly recognizes the necessity of admitting the existence of some inscrutable energy farther back than the remotest cause attainable by human research. The first efforts at reasoning traced events to superhuman agency exerted by numerous beings called gods, but the conception of whom was strictly anthropomorphic. Science was born in the desire to find fixed and orderly energies with which to replace the capricious wills of the primitive gods. While yet in its cradle, science manifested a consciousness of its mission, in attacking and destroying the contemporany religious faiths and pretensions. In seeking the causes of phenomena, from below, instead of above, ancient Greek speculation struck into the fundamental idea that atoms and molecules are the ultimate constituents of the cosmos. Democritus, who is pronounced a philosopher superior to Plato or Aristotle, first gave precision and form to this idea. He held to the eternity of the atoms, the materiality of the soul, and denied chance. He first advanced the idea of vortices in the genesis of worlds. Empedocles suggested that those combinations which were suited to their ends, maintain themselves from their very nature, and thus launched the thought which has taken form, in our own time, as the doctrine of the "survival of the fittest." Epicurus, while actuated by an equal desire to discover law and order in the phenomena of the universe, and thus dispel the superstitions of the existing religions, did not reject the belief in divine existence; and was himself a worshipper of the gods. Lucretius, if he admitted divine existence, maintained that the world shows no proof of intelligent design, and that all things have been caused by the shock of the atoms, while the fittest combinations have persisted. He is thought to have suggested the nebular hypothesis to Kant. As to Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, they imposed a yoke on the human mind which remaius, to some extent, unbroken to the present day. This auspicious inauguration of the advance of science was arrested by the quickening of the religious feeling through the introduction of Christianity, which made the mistake of adopting biblical interpretation as the criterion of all truth. The philosophy of Aristotle sanctioned and aided the a priori methods of the schoolmen; and, though science made positive advances in Arabia, the bond of tradition was not seriously wrenched in Europe, till the time of Copernicus and Bruno. Bacon strengthened the incipient bias toward inductive methods; and Descartes, though setting out from a first principle, unconsciously abandoned it, to present the cosmos as a pure mechanism. The full establishment of monotheism was favorable to the con |