TYNDALL

1820-1893

JOHN TYNDALL, the distinguished scientist, was born in Ireland, in 1820; he died in Haslemere. England, in 1893. At an early age he devoted himself to the study of physics, and soon achieved a reputation which led to his appointment, at the age of thirty-three, to the chair of Natural Philosophy

in the Royal Institution of London.

He won fame as a writer and lecturer on subjects of natural science, and of all men most exhaustively discussed the important theory of the mutual convertibility of heat and motion. He was a vigorous and fascinating writer. His best-known works are Heat, considered as a Mode of Motion;" "Hours of Exercise in the Alps," "Fragments of Science for Unscientific People,” and "Six Lectures on Light." These lectures were delivered by the author in the principal cities of the United States, and were cordially admired for their rhetorical beauty and their instructiveness.

Professor Tyndall's experience as an instructor at Queenswood College, though brief, seems to have had an important part in the molding of his character and in confirming his predilection for the special field of labor in which he toiled with a success so signal. Though best known as an explorer in experimental physics, he was highly esteemed as a philosophic thinker.

AN ADDRESS TO STUDENTS

I.

THE doctrine has been held that the mind of the child is like a sheet of white paper, on which by education we can write what characters we please. This doctrine assuredly needs qualification and correction. In physics, when an external force is applied to a body with a view of affecting its inner texture, if we wish to predict the result, we must know whether the external force conspires with or opposes the internal forces of the body itself; and in bringing the influence of education to bear upon the new-born man, his inner powers must be also taken into account. Не comes to us as a t indle of inherited capacities and tendencies, labeled "from the indefinite past to the indefinite future; " and he makes his transit from the one to the other through the education of the present time. The object of that education is, or ought to be, to provide wise exercise for his capacities, wise direction for his tendencies, and through this exercise and this direction to furnish his mind with such knowledge as may contribute to the usefulness, the beauty, and the nobleness of his life.

How is this discipline to be secured, this knowledge imparted? Two rival methods now solicit attention, the one organized and equipped, the labors of centuries having been expended in bringing it to its present state of perfection; the other, more or less chaotic, but becoming daily less so, and giving signs of enormous power, both as a source of knowledge and as a means of discipline. These two methods are the classical and the scientific method. I wish they were not rivals; it is only bigotry and

short-sightedness that make them so; for assuredly it is possible to give both of them fair play.

Though hardly authorized to express any opinion whatever upon the subject, I nevertheless hold the opinion that the proper study of a language is an intellectual discipline of the highest kind. If I except discussions on the comparative merits of Popery and Protestantism, English grammar was the most important discipline of my boyhood. The piercing through the involved and inverted sentences of "Paradise Lost ;" the linking of the verb to its often distant nominative, of the relative to its distant antecedent, of the agent to the object of the transitive verb, oʻ the preposition to the noun or pronoun which it governed; the study of variations in mood and tense, the transformations often necessary to bring out the true grammatical structure of a sentence, all this was to my young mind a discipline of the highest value, and, indeed, a source of unflagging delight. How I rejoiced when I found a great author tripping, and was fairly able to pin him to a corner from which there was no escape! As 1 speak, some of the sentences which exercised me when a boy rise to my recollection. "He that hath ears to hear, let him hear." That was one of them, where the "he" is left, as it were, floating in mid-air without any verb to support it. I speak thus of English, because it was of real value to me. I do not speak oi other languages, because their educational value for me was almost insensible. But, knowing the value of English so well, I should be the last to deny, or even to doubt, the high discipline involved in the proper study of Latin and Greek.

That study, moreover, has other merits and recommendations which have been already slightly touched upon. It is organized and systematized by long-continued use. It is an instrument wielded by some of the best intellects of the country in the education of youth; and it can point to results in the achievements . of our foremost men. What, then, has science to offer which is in the least degree likely to compete with such a system? Speaking of the world and all that therein is, of the sky and the stars around it, the ancient writer says, "And God saw every thing that

He had made, and behold it was very good." It is the body of things thus described which science offers to the study of man.

1

The ultimate problem of physics is to reduce matter by analysis to its lowest condition of divisibility, and force to its simplest manifestations, and then by synthesis to construct from these elements the world as it stands. We are still a long way from the final solution of this problem; and when the solution comes, it wil' be one more of spiritual insight than of actual observation. But though we are still a long way from this complete intellectual mastery of Nature, we have conquered vast regions of it, have learned their politics and the play of their powers.

We live upon a ball of matter eight thousand miles in diameter, swathed by an atmosphere of unknown height. This ball has been molten by heat, chilled to a solid, and sculptured by water; it is made up of substances possessing distinctive properties and modes of action, properties which have an immediate bearing upon the continuance of man in health, and on his recovery from disease, on which moreover depend all the arts of industrial life. These properties and modes of action offer problems to the intellect, some profitable to the child, and others sufficient to tax the highest powers of the philosopher.

Our native sphere turns on its axis and revolves in space. It is one of a band which do the same. It is illuminated by a sun which, though nearly a hundred millions of miles distant, can be brought virtually into our closets and there subjected to examination. It has its winds and clouds, its rain and frost, its light, heat, sound, electricity, and magnetism. And it has its vast kingdoms of animals and vegetables. To a most amazing extent the human mind has conquered these things, and reveals the logic which runs through them. Were they facts only, without logical relationship, science might, as a means of discipline, suffer in comparison with language. But the whole body of phenomena is instinct with law; the facts are hung on principles; and the value of physical science as a means of discipline consists in the

putting together; the opposite of analysis

motion of the intellect, both inductively and deductively,' along the lines of law marked out by phenomena. As regards that discipline to which I have already referred as derivable from the study of languages, that, and more, are involved in the study of physical science. Indeed, I believe it would be possible so to limit and arrange the study of a portion of physics as to render the mental exercise involved in it almost qualitatively the same as that involved in the unraveling of a language.

II.

I HAVE thus far limited myself to the purely intellectual side of this question. But man is not all intellect. If he were so, science would, I believe, be his proper nutriment. But he feels as well as thinks; he is receptive of the sublime and the beautiful as well as of the true. Indeed, I believe that even the intellectual action of a complete man is, consciously or unconsciously, sustained by an undercurrent of the emotions. It is vain, I think, to attempt to separate moral and emotional nature from intellectual nature. Let a man but observe himself, and he will, if I mistake not, find that, in nine cases out of ten, moral or immoral considerations, as the case may be, are the motive force which pushes his intellect into action. The reading of the works of two men, neither of them imbued with the spirit of modern science, neither of them, indeed, friendly to that spirit, has placed me here to-day. These men are the English Carlyle and the American Emerson. I never should have gone through Analytical Geometry and the Calculus had it not been for those men. never should have become a physical investigator, and hence without them I should not have been here to-day. They told me what I ought to do in a way that caused me to do it, and all my consequent intellectual action is to be traced to this purely moral source. To Carlyle and Emerson I ought to add Fichte, the greatest representative of pure idealism. These three unscientific men made me a practical scientific worker. They called out,

1 See Bacon, p. 42

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