term, are the same in both cases,namely, carbonic acid and water. The force-products are also the same, heat within the body, or heat and work outside the body. Thus far, every action of the body belongs to the domain either of physics or of chemistry." Further, Professor Tyndall shows us how the action of the nerves consists in liberating a vast amount of stored force which is latent in the muscles, just as the power of steam is latent in the steam-engine till some one opens a valve which sets the steam to work, or as the electric force is stored in a galvanic battery till some one completes the circuit which sets the battery to work. It is not that the nervous energy directly produces the muscular energy, but that it liberates muscular energy which had been previously stored up. Then Professor Tyndall quotes from Lange the following illustration of this liberation of pent-up force : "A merchant sits complacently in his easy chair, not knowing whether smoking, sleeping, newspaper-reading, or the digestion of food occupies the largest portion of personality. A servant enters the room with a telegram bearing the words 'Antwerp, &c.-Jones and Co. have failed.'-'Tell James to harness the horses.' The servant flies. Up starts the merchant, wide awake, makes a dozen paces through the room, descends to the counting-house, dictates letters and forwards despatches. He jumps into his carriage, the horses snort, and their driver is immediately at the Bank, on the Bourse, and among his commercial friends. Before an hour has elapsed he is again at home, when he throws himself once more into his easy chair, with a deep drawn sigh, 'Thank God I am protected against the worst! And now for further reflection.' This complex mass of action, emotional, intellectual, and mechanical, is evolved by the impact upon the retina of the infinitesimal waves of light coming from a few pencilmarks on a bit of paper. We have, as Lange says, terror, hope, sensation, calculation, possible ruin, and victory compressed into a moment. What caused the merchant to spring out of his chair? The contraction of his muscles. What made his muscles contract? An impulse of the nerves, which lifted the proper latch, and liberated the muscular power. Whence this impulse? From the centre of the nervous system. But how did it originate there? This is the critical question." And Professor Tyndall warns us not to assume that it was a soul or intelligence within the body which, stimulated by an act of knowledge and a consequent emotion of apprehension, set all this chain of nervous antecedents and mus 66 cular consequents in motion, lest we try to explain the little known by the less known, or indeed, by the absolutely unknown. On the contrary, he assures us, the only scientific procedure is to refer this impulse originating in the centre of the nervous system to other changes in nerve-tissue which have preceded it, seeing that all our scientific knowledge teaches us to refer physical effects to physical causes. "Who or what is it," says Professor Tyndall, “ that sends and receives these messages through the bodily organism? You picture the muscles as hearkening to the commands sent through the motor-nerves, and you picture the sensor-nerves as the vehicles of incoming intelligence; are you not bound to supplement this mechanism by the assumption of an entity which uses it? In other words, are you not forced by your own exposition into the hypothesis of a free human soul? That hypothesis is offered as an explanation or simplification of a series of phenomena more or less obscure. But adequate reflection shows that, instead of introducing light into our minds, it increases our darkness. You do not in this case explain the unknown in terms of the known, which, as stated above, is the method of science, but you explain the unknown in terms of the more unknown." "The warrant of science extends only to the statement that the terror, hope, sensation, and calculation of Lange's merchant are psychical phenomena, produced by or associated with the molecular motion set up by the waves of light in a previously prepared brain.' these principles, then, it is obvious that heat and motion, and nervous action and muscular tissue, and the mode in which touching a valve liberates steam, are all phenomena which are knowable in a sense in which the subject that knows them is not knowable. It is scientific to be quite certain that "a bowler who imparts a velocity of thirty feet to an 8-lb. ball consumes in the act one-tenth of a grain of carbon." But it is thoroughly unscientific to be certain that there is 'some one' who has this knowledge and who acts on it. It is scientific to be sure of the laws of motion. It is thoroughly unscientific to be sure of the existence of the person who is thus sure. The self which is the assumed centre of all On knowledge, is a mere centre of dark- affairs,-meaning, as we understand him, ness, and while various true propositions that it always takes other physical enercan be stated, the assertion that I or gy to determine how any special stock any one can know them to be true is a of physical energy shall be released or false and unscientific one, which con- expended, so that it as much depends founds the relation between phenomena on the set of the currents in the prewith an unknowable personality that has viously existing physical energy, which no relation to them. But then, if there valve shall be opened and which kept be no true nominative to the verb "to shut, as it depends on the previous acknow," does not that throw doubts at cumulations of such energy how much least as great on the object of knowl- energy shall emerge when the particular edge? If I seem to myself to have ob- valve is opened. Professor Tyndall folserved and mastered the laws of heat and lowing Mili, and other such teachers, motion, and am yet going quite astray in warns us that though we can determine assuming that there is any self to master our actions according to our wishes, we those laws, how am I to be certain that cannot determine our wishes, these bethe heat or motion which is the thing I ing determined for us by the laws of appear to know, has any existence either? physical organisation, of hereditary Deny all reality, as Professor Tyndall transmission, of social circumstance, and teaches us to do, to the nominative of other conditions of our previous life. the sentence, "I know heat and motion," But assuming this teaching to be true, and can any one be sure that the ac- whither does it lead us? Why, of cusatives have any reality either? They course, to the doctrine of pure materialexist to me only as they exist in my con- ism, that physical energy is the primal sciousness. But if the very pronoun 'my' fount from which all mental phenomena is an illusion, how can I be sure that the ultimately proceed, and proceed by an illusion does not affect all that that little immutable process of evolution. If not word qualifies? Expunge the delusive only is the stock of physical energy in notion that there is really an 'I,'-there the universe a fixed stock, but if also the is no need to use the word 'soul' at all, distribution of that stock is absolutely -to perceive, to receive sensation, and dependent on the character and amount to transmit commands, and why should of it, then it is clear there is nowhere for not that which is as closely coupled to this wishes and other such mental phenom'I' in the very act of perception, as one ena to come out of, except the one stock end of a stick is to the other end by the of physical energy which is the primary stick itself, be rejected with it? Pro- assumption with which Professor Tynfessor Tyndall is untrue to his own dall starts, and it cannot, in his belief, principles. If it is thoroughly unscien- be wholly uncreated and self-caused. tific to assume an entity who perceives Wishes, motives, volitions, aspirations, and feels and wills, it is clearly unscien- and the rest, must either be unexplained tific to assume that there is anything per- phenomena somehow due to this primaceived, or felt, or willed. The fictitious ry stock of physical energy, or must be character of the whole act of knowledge uncaused, which is clearly not Professor must surely follow from the fictitious Tyndall's view, since he defines science character of the central assumption as the effort to explain the unknown by which gives that act a meaning. If what is better known. If, then, he bethere is no reason to suppose that there lieves, as we understand him, that physiis a person to apprehend the external cal energy contains within itself the world, there can be no reason to sup- laws and causes of its own distribution, pose that there is an external world to mind is a mere unexplained phenomenon apprehend, for it is only through the act of physics. If that be not true, if the of apprehension that any one even sup- whole stock of physical energy in existposes himself to reach it. ence' does not regulate its own laws of distribution, then there must be something else which does regulate it, and human will might well be defined as that which, though not able to create physical energy, is able to liberate and direct it Again, Professor Tyndall teaches us that because we cannot produce physical energy, but can only release or direct it, therefore the supposed human will can play no real part in human this direction or that, to concentrate it on one purpose or on another, within certain limits, as it will. Evidently, then, Professor Tyndall either teaches us pure materialism, or leaves us free to believe that though the stock of physical energy in the world is always the same, incapable of increase or decrease, the way in which it is to be applied, whether by one channel to one purpose, or by another channel to another purpose, is left more or less at our disposal. Yet as we understand him, he forbids us to believe either of these alternatives. He wishes us to regard physical energy as containing in itself the precise laws of its own distribution in one place, and yet forbids us in another to refer consciousness and its states to these laws. He says, almost in the same breath, "molecular motion produces consciousness," and then again, "physical science offers no justification for the notion that states of consciousness can be generated by molecular motion." Which does he wish us to believe? If the first, then we know what he means, and that it is pure materialism. If the second, he leaves plenty of room for the influence of free-will, in spite of that absolute limitation of the stock of physical energy in the world which he teaches. But it is hardly reasonable to take credit for both assumptions, that molecular motion is the ultimate cause of everything -and that mental states are not caused by it, any more than it is caused by them. Still more difficult is it to follow out Professor Tyndall's teaching as to moral necessity, when at length, he has somehow skipped the gulf between physics and morals, and come to assume moral necessity as the truth. He says, very justly, that if the doctrine of Necessity does away with moral responsibility, it yet leaves in all their strength the motives for discouraging actions injurious to society, and encouraging those which are beneficial to society. That is quite true. But Professor Tyndall appears to admit that though we should encourage what we find useful and discourage what is injurious by every means in our power, approbation and disapprobation are unmeaning, except on that hypothesis of moral freedom which he has rejected. We may visit what is injurious with dis agreeable results in order to prevent others doing it, but it is childish to talk of being morally offended with what was as inevitable as the fail of an apple when its stalk breaks. This being granted, then, being shut off from the dispensing of approbation and disapprobation, we shall be unfortunately also shut off from using by far the most powerful of the moral hindrances to wrong and crime. As the German thinker said of God that if He did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him, so we might fairly say of moral approbation and disapprobation. If they did not exist, we should be obliged to invent them. Mere bestowal of pleasure or pain would be of little use without that approbation and disapprobation which make the pleasure and pain really effective, and give them their stimulating or deterrent power. It is not shutting up a man in prison, but shutting him up because his action is treated by society as morally disgraceful, which is the formidable thing. Professor Tyndall in giving this up, gives up the very sting of the penalty, and deprives it of more than half its deterrent effect. And as for the preacher, why, to suppose that the preacher could preach against iniquity with good effect, as Professor Tyndall says, after he had ceased to believe that there was such a thing at all as iniquity in any sense except that in which deformity and iniquity are the same, Professor Tyndall is the most sanguine of men if he thinks so. the punishment of persons who are believed to have been incapable of doing anything but what they did, would soon become as impossible as it has already become impossible to punish criminal lunatics. Follow Professor Tyndall's principles out to their proper limits, and all punishment, properly so called, would cease. Indeed One word more. Why does Professor Tyndall say so airily that he has no objection to talk "poetically" of a soul, though he has a strong objection to believe in one really? If you are content to make your soul a poetic rendering of a phenomenon which refuses the yoke of ordinary mechanical laws, I, for one, would not object to this exercise of ideality." But surely he ought to object to it, if it is false and misleading. We mean by the 'self'a real thing, altogether distinguishable from my organisation; and if it is not that, the use of the word 'self,' or 'I,' or 'soul' is not a harmless exercise of "ideality," but a falsehood, and a very dangerous one. We do not understand this liberty granted by Professor Tyndall to tell "poetically" all poetically" all sorts of fibs which he objects to as matter of serious belief. The belief in the free self is either a most dangerous fiction or the greatest of truths, and Pro fessor Tyndall's willingness to deal with it in a poetic and ideal way, without insisting on the strict truth about it, as it seems to him, is not, we think, quite so catholic a feature of his character, or so creditable to him as he evidently supposes it to be. poses it to be. Let us tell the truth about ourselves, even if that truth be only that there is no truth to tell.— The Spectator. FERDINAND DE LESSEPS. BY THE EDITOR. FERDINAND DE LESSEPS, the subject of our portrait this month, and universally famous as the constructor of the Suez Canal, was born at Versailles, France, on the 19th of November, 1805. Though known now chiefly for his great engineering achievement, his career to middle life was that of a diplomatist, beginning in 1825, when he was attached to the French consulate at Lisbon. In 1828 he was transferred to the consulate of Tunis, and after the taking of Algiers was charged with securing the submission of the Bey of Constantine. In 1831 he went to Egypt, where three times in succession he was temporary consul-general at Alexandria. During the occupation of Syria by Ibrahim Pasha, he did much to secure protection for the unfortunate Christians of that country, and performed an influential part in the re-establishment of peace between Mehemet Ali and the Sultan. In 1839 he was appointed consul at Malaga, and entered upon the same post at Barcelona in 1842. "During the bombardment of the latter city by Espartero in the same year," says a writer in the "American Cyclopædia," "he rendered great services to sufferers of all nations. He frequently exposed his life during the fighting to save the lives of others; his energetic remonstrances postponed the bombardment for several days, and when it took place he hired vessels and personally superintended the removal of fugitives. For this he received decorations from the governments of France, Sardinia, the Two Sicilies, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Spain; the Chamber of Commerce at Marseilles sent him a complimentary address, while that of Barcelona placed his bust in its hall." After the revolution of 1848 he was recalled to Paris, but returned almost immediately to Madrid as minister. The next year he was transferred to Switzerland, and then to Italy, where he was instructed to co-operate with other diplomatists in restoring order in the Papal dominions and preventing Liberal excesses from interfering with the establishment of a regular government. His work in this capacity was too favorable to the oppressed Roman people to suit the home authorities, and he was not only recalled but severely censured in an official report by the Council of State. He defended himself, however, with great ability. In October, 1854, M. de Lesseps was invited to Egypt by Said Pasha, the new Viceroy, and while there examined thoroughly the project of the canal across the Isthmus of Suez. Two years later he drew up a memorial giving full details of the "Compagnie Universelle du Canal Maritime de Suez," a stock company for which the Viceroy had granted him a charter for 99 years (dated November 30th, 1854; confirmed January 5th, 1856). From this time, De Lesseps devoted himself entirely to the project, and by the force of energy, perseverance, and financial and diplomatic skill, raised the necessary capital, and began the work in 1859. In the prosecution of his task, he encountered many difficulties besides those interposed by nature. Eminent English engineers, among them Robert Stephenson, questioned its practicability; the British government regarded it as a political project, and refused to give it encouragement; and various complications arose with both the Turkish and Egyptian governments. But De Lesseps triumphed over all, and on August 15th, 1869, had the satisfaction of seeing the waters of the Red Sea and the Mediterranean mingle in the Bitter Lakes. The canal was formally opened on November 17th, 1869, with grand ceremonies, in the presence of the Empress of the French, the Emperor of Austria, the Crown Prince of Prussia, Prince Amadeus of Italy, and many other distinguished personages. Even after it was opened, doubts were felt as to the utility of the work; but the experience of seven years has vindicated the sagacity of the projector, and already, to quote from McCoan's "Egypt as It Is," reviewed in the ECLECTIC of last month, "this once discredited property may be pronounced nearly as great a financial as it is an industrial success." De Lesseps has been decorated by nearly all the sovereigns of Europe, besides being the recipient of many other honors. Since the completion of the Suez Canal, he has suggested the conversion of the Desert of Sahara into an inland sea, and the cutting of a ship-canal through the Isthmus of Corinth to connect the Gulfs of Lepanto and Egina. His latest scheme, for which he has received valuable concessions from the Shah of Persia, is the "Central Asian Railway," designed to connect the south of Europe with India. LITERARY NOTICES. BOSTON MONDAY LECTURES. BIOLOGY, WITH PRELUDES ON CURRENT EVENTS. By Joseph Cook. With three colored plates. Boston: 7. R. Osgood & Co. On the 2d of October of last year, the Rev. Joseph Cook, whose name until then had never been heard by the great majority of readers and thinkers, began a series of "Monday Lectures" at the Meionaon, Boston. The general subject of his lectures was Biology, or, more specifically, the scientific theory of Evolution; and their object, in accordance with the avowed design of the course in which they were delivered, was "to present the results of the freshest German, English, and American scholarship on the more important and difficult topics concerning the relation of Religion and Science." The very first lecture, dealing with the evolutionary doctrines of Huxley and Tyndall, made such an impression that with the fifth lecture the lectureship had to be transferred to the Park Street Church, and shortly afterward to Tremont Temple, in order to accommodate the ever-increasing audiences. A noteworthy feature of these audiences, assembled at noon on Mondays, was that, to quote the language of the publisher's note, they "included, in large numbers, representatives of the broadest scholarship, the profoundest philosophy, the acutest scientific research, and generally of the finest intellectual culture of Boston and New England;" and through the medium of press reports and the consequent discussions, this pronounced local sensation was transmitted to all parts of the country, and even to England. Much curiosity has been felt, of course, as to the quality of the lectures, which, begun with no preliminary trumpeting, could awaken so profound and wide-spread an interest, and it is not surprising that several editions of the volume containing them should already have passed into the hands of the reading public. Nor is it surprising, after giving the book a careful perusal, that the testimony of readers in regard to their merits is quite as emphatic, if not so enthusiastic, as that of those who listened to them as they fell from the lips of the impassioned orator. Mr. Cook's rhetorical and literary skill would obtain him a hearing on any subject he chose to discuss; but it is very soon seen that beneath the glowing and almost too fervidly eloquent language there is a force of logic, a breadth of intellectual culture, and a mastery of all the issues involved such as are seldom exhibited by participants on either side in the great controversy between Religion and Science. It may be said unqualifiedly that the pulpit has never brought such comprehensiveness and precision of knowledge combined with such logi. cal and literary skill to the discussion of the questions raised by the supposed tendency of biological discovery. Martineau and Dr. McCosh have equal, and perhaps greater, command of the argumentative weapons furnished by metaphysics and psychology, but the peculiar feature of Mr. Cook's work is that, joined to a German thoroughness in these important departments of knowledge, he has trained himself to cope with scientists in their special field of physical and vital phenomena. The theistic interpretation of the doctrine of evolution finds its most eloquent if not its strong |