Lay Sermons, Addresses, And Reviews

LAY SERMONS, ADDRESSES, AND REVIEWS - - PREFATORY LETTER. 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 the book, chiefly on the ground that the oldest of the papers in it is a good deal younger than our friendship. In the latter, I intended to comment upon certain criticisms with which some of these Essays have been met. But, on turning the matter over in my mind, I began to fcar that a formal dedication at the beginning of such a volume would look like a grand lodge in front of a set of cottages while a complete defence of any of my old papera would simply amount to writing a new one-a labour for which I am, at present, by no means fit. The book must go forth, therefore, without m y better substitute for either Dedication, or Preface, than this letter before concluding which it is necessary for me to notify you, and any other reader, of twoor three matters. The first is, that the oldest Essay of the whole, that On the Educational Value of - the Natural History Sciences, contains a view of the nature of the differences between liing and not-living bodies out of which I have long since grown. Secondly, ih the same paper, there is a statement concerning the method of the mathematical sciences, which, repeated asd expanded elsewhere, brought upon me, during the meeting of the British Association at Exeter, the artillery of our eminent friend Professor Sylvester. No one knows better than you do, how readily I should defer to the opinion of so great a mathematician if the question at issue were really, as he seemsto think it is, amathematical one. But I submit, that the dictum of a mathematical athlete upon a difficult prblem which mathematics offers to philosophy, has no more special weight, than the verdict of that great pedestrian Captain Barclay would have had, in settling a disputed point in the physiolgy of locomotion. The genius which sighs for new. worlds to conquer beyond that surprising region in which geometry, algebra, and the theory of numbers melt into one mother like sunset tints, or the colours of a dying dolphin, may be of comparatively little service in the cold domain mostly lighted by the moon, some say of philosophy. And the-more I think of it, the more does our friend seem to me to fall into the position of one of those verstiindigo 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 no way answerable for the origination of the doctrine. he criti- eises and the 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 an observational, inductive, and experimental science as mathematics and that, I confess, appears to me to be a reductio ad absurdunt of his argument. Thirdly, the Essay On the Physical Basis of Life was intended to contain a. plain and untechnical statement of one of the great tendencies of modern biological thought, accompanied by a protest, from the philosophical side, against what is commonly called Alaterialism. The result of my well-meant efforts I find to be, that I am generally eredited with having invented protoplasm in the interests of materialism. My unlucky Lay Sermon has Bcen attacked by mieroseopists, ignorantalike of Biology and Philosophy by philosophers, not vcry learned in either Biology or Microscopy by clergy- men of several denominations and by some few writers who have taken the trouble to understand the subject...