The burden of my writings in this connection is as much a recognition of the weakness of science as an assertion of its strength. In 1867 I told the working-men of Dundee that while making the largest demand for freedom of investigation; while considering science to be alike powerful as an instrument of intellectual culture, and as a ministrant to the material wants of men—if asked whether science has solved, or is likely in our day to solve, "the problem of the universe," I must shake my head in doubt. I compare the mind of man to a musical instrument with a certain range of notes, beyond which in both directions exists infinite silence. The phenomena of matter and force come within our intellectual range; but behind, and above, and around us, the real mystery of the universe lies unsolved, and, as far as we are concerned, is incapable of solution.
While refreshing my mind on these old themes I am struck by the poverty of my own thought; appearing to myself as a person possessing one idea, which so overmasters him that he is never weary of repeating it. That idea is the polar conception of the grandeur and the littleness of man—the vastness of his range in some respects and directions, and his powerlessness to take a single step in others. In 1868, before the mathematical and physical section of the British Association, then assembled at Norwich, I repeat the same well-worn note:
"In affirming the growth of the human body to be mechanical, and thought as exercised by us to have its correlative in the physics of the brain, the position of the 'materialist,' as far as that position is tenable, is stated. I think the materialist will be able finally to maintain this position against all attacks, but I do not think he can pass beyond it. The problem of the connection of body and soul is as insoluble in its modern form as it was in the prescientific ages. Phosphorus is a constituent of the human brain, and a trenchant German writer has exclaimed, 'Ohne Phospor kein Gedanke!' That may or may not be the case; but, even if we knew it to be the case, the knowledge would not lighten our darkness. On both sides of the zone here assigned to the materialist, he is equally helpless. If you ask him whence is this 'matter,' of which we have been discoursing—who or what divided it into molecules, and impressed upon them this necessity of running into organic forms—he has no answer. Science is also mute in regard to such questions. But if the materialist is confounded, and Science is rendered dumb, who else is prepared with an answer? Let us lower our heads and acknowledge our ignorance, priest and philosopher, one and all."
The roll of echoes which succeeded the lecture delivered by Prof. Virchow at Munich on September 22, 1877, was long and loud. The Times published a nearly full translation of the lecture, and it was eagerly commented on in other journals. Glances from it to an address delivered by me before the Midland Institute last autumn were very frequent. Prof. Virchow was held up to me in some quarters as a model of philosophic caution, who by his reasonableness reproved my rashness and by his depth reproved my shallowness. With true theologic courtesy I was sedulously emptied not only of "the principles of
