[Footnote A:  The Critical Philosophy of Kant, Vol.  I. p. 34]

[Footnote B:  Address to the British Association, 1874, p. 54.]

[Footnote C:  Belfast Address, 1874.]

“Yet they did not abolish the gods, but they sent them well out of the way, With the rarest of nectar to drink, and blue fields of nothing to sway."[A]

[Footnote A:  Clerk Maxwell:  “Notes of the President’s Address,” British Association, 1874.]

Now these declarations of Mr. Tyndall are, to say the least, somewhat ambiguous and shadowy.  Yet, when he informs us that eating and drinking “illustrate the control of mind by matter,” and “that the line of life traced backwards leads towards a purely physical condition,” it is a little difficult to avoid the conclusion that he regards science as destined.

  “To tread the world
  Into a paste, and thereof make a smooth
  Uniform mound, whereon to plant its flag."[B]

[Footnote B:  Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau.]

For the conclusion of the whole argument seems to be, that all we know as facts are mere forms of matter; although the stubborn refusal of consciousness to be resolved into natural force, and its power of constructing for itself a world of symbols, gives science no little trouble, and forces it to acknowledge complete ignorance of the nature of the power from which all comes.

  “So roll things to the level which you love,
  That you could stand at ease there and survey
  The universal Nothing undisgraced
  By pert obtrusion of some old church-spire
  I’ the distance! “[A]

[Footnote A:  Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau.]

Some writers on ethics and religion have adopted the same view of the goal of the idea of evolution.  In consistency with this supposed tendency of science, to resolve all things into their simplest, and earliest forms, religion has been traced back to the superstition and ghost-worship of savages; and then it has been contended that it is, in essence, nothing more than superstition and ghost-worship.  And, in like manner, morality, with its categorical imperative of duty, has been traced back, without a break, to the ignorant fear of the vengeance of a savage chief.  A similar process in the same direction reduces the love divine, of which our poet speaks, into brute lust; somewhat sublimated, it is true, in its highest forms, but not fundamentally changed.

  “Philosophers deduce you chastity
  Or shame, from just the fact that at the first
  Whoso embraced a woman in the field,
  Threw club down and forewent his brains beside;
  So, stood a ready victim in the reach
  Of any brother-savage, club in hand. 
  Hence saw the use of going out of sight
  In wood or cave to prosecute his loves."[B]

[Footnote B:  Bishop Blouhram’s Apology.]