Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 22.djvu/532

516  O may I join the choir invisible, Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence: live In pulses stirred to generosity. In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn For miserable aims that end with self; In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, And, with their mild persistence, urge men's search To vaster issues. So to live is heaven."

In this year, too, at Belfast, Professor Tyndall delivered, before the British Association, his celebrated address, in which, "abandoning all disguise," he says that "the confession that I feel bound to make before you is, that I prolong the vision backward across the boundary of the experimental evidence, and discern, in that matter which we, in our ignorance and notwithstanding our professed reverence for its Creator, have hitherto covered with opprobrium, the promise and potency of every form and quality of life." The discovery, if it may be called so, was not exactly a new one. The same avowal had been made, more than twenty years before, by W. B. Carpenter, but the rise of the evolution school in the interim caused an importance to attach to Professor Tyndall's utterances that has not attended upon Dr. Carpenter's. The address at once took rank as the high-water mark of materialism. Lastly, in the same year, we come to Greg's "Warnings of Cassandra," and to a work which, together with this, is symptomatic of the feelings of the next few years—Hartmann's "Philosophy of the Unknowable."

The prevailing tone, after the battle had been fought, was one of despair and pessimism. Science had won the victory, but thoughtful minds, even on that side, saw that it might be possible to push it too far. Hence came attempts at compromise, the cry for which went up, in 1874, from John Morley, the editor of the "Fortnightly Review," the chief Positivist organ. Still, for the present, the general tone was disheartening in the extreme, and its influence is traceable in many ways. Poetry has been distinctly deteriorated by it. In politics it led to a temporary reaction in favor of conservatism. Life appeared to be, as Pope had said, a mighty maze, but the plan was lost. Instead of the authoritative tone of the Church, the voices of different