Democritus at Belfast3
Tyndall, high perched on Speculation’s summit,
May drop his sounding line in Nature’s ocean,
But that great deep has depths beyond his plummet,
The springs of law and life, mind, matter, motion.
Democritus imagined that the soul
Was made of atoms, spheric, smooth and fiery;
Plato conceived it as a radiant whole—
A heavenly unit baffling man’s inquiry.
Indolent Gods, immeasurably bored,
Beyond the blast of Boreas and Eurus,
Too lazy Man to punish or reward,
Such was the heaven conceived by Epicurus.
If, as the wide-observant Darwin dreams,
Man be developed of the Ascidian, ·
Methinks his great deeds and poetic dreams
Scarce square with his molluscous pre-meridian.
But, even as Milton’s demons, problem tossed,
When they had set their maker at defiance,
Still “found no end, in wandering mazes lost,”
So is it with our modern men of science.
Still in the “Open Sesame” of Law,
Life’s master key professing to deliver,
But meeting with deaf ear or scorn-clenched jaw,
Our question, “Doth not law imply lawgiver?”
Betwixt the Garden and the Portico,
Thou vacillating servant, often flittest,
And when we seek the source of law to know,
Giv’st us a phrase, “survival of the fittest.”
Pray who may be the fittest to survive,
The spark of thought for coming time to kindle,
The sacred fire of science keep alive?—
Plato, Agassiz, Humboldt, Huxley, Tyndall?
If Tyndall’s last word be indeed the last—
Of Hope and Faith hence with each rag and tatter!
A black cloud shrouds our future as our past:
Matter, the wise man’s God; the Crowd’s—no Matter.
Notes
3. (See Report of Professor Tyndall’s Inaugural Discourse to the British Association.)