As President of the British Association in its Belfast meeting
in August, 1874, Professor Tyndall created much sensation by declaring his belief that in matter we find "the promise and potency of every form and quality of life." He qualified the assertion by declaring that the passage from matter to mind is inscrutable, and that there is much mystery and room for the play of poetic imagina- tion about the transition from modes of matter to modes of mind ; but he never revoked that expression of belief which made him the representative in this country of a sort of poetical materialism. He was a rash politician, too fond of declaring the leader of the party to which he was opposed deserving of the block, even while he professed for him deep personal tenderness and attachment. A great experi- mentalist, an enthusiastic discoverer, a very warm-hearted man, and a hasty and explosive thinker in every field that was not purely physical, his was one of the most char- acteristic figures of the last fifty years. In the field of philosophy, he was a rhetorician only, in the field of physics an exact thinker.
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