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But, while the world was in ferment over the question of man’s alleged kinship with the monkey, there came the further startling fact that the President of the British Association also proclaimed his belief in materialism and, inferentially, that there was no life after death. Englishmen had not before realized how widely materialism had spread through England and Europe. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that a majority at least of the leading thinkers had become materialists.

In travelling outside science into metaphysics, Tyndall betrayed a lamentable ignorance of the latter—a parallel case to that of Bishop Wilberforce when he attempted to meddle with science. Martineau, referring to the first quotation above, wrote: “There is no magic in the superlatively little to draw from the universe its last secret. Size is but relative, magnified or dwindled by a glass, variable with the organ of perception: to one being, the speck which only the microscope can show us may be a universe; to another, the solar system but a molecule; and in the passing from the latter to the former you reach no end of search or beginning of things. You merely substitute a miniature of nature for its life-size without at all showing whence the features arise.”