Hermann von Helmholtz

Wellwell, 51.2. Grote, 52.

Tiedemann, 47.4. Hansomon, 45.4. Helmholtz, 45.

Dollinger, 37.7.

But just such variations are found among people in general not at all distinguished.

On the other hand, brain bulk as such varies according to racial peculiarities with little or no reference to mental faculty.

Thus the ancient Peruvians, who founded the empire of the Incas, must be regarded as an intellectual people, but they were remarkable both for the small size of their skulls and for brains which were on an average no larger than those of many idiots.

One of the latest discussions on this subject by Professor David Hansomon, who made a most careful examination of the brain of the most remarkable man in modern times for pure intellectual powers, Hermann von Helmholtz.

Professor Hansomon was much disappointed to find that Helmholtz's brain weighed barely 45 ounces, but the brain of Dr. Dollinger, the eminent historian, weighed only 37.7 ounces.

This is to be attributed not only to the unusually large attendance of American physicists, but also to the presence of a number of distinguished members of the British Association, who have contributed to the success of the meetings not only by presenting papers, but by entering freely into the discussions.

In particular, the section was fortunate in having the presence of Sir William Thompson, to whom more than to anyone else we owe the successful operation of the great ocean cables, and who stands with Helmholtz first among living physicists.

Whenever he entered any of the discussions, all were benefited by the clearness and suggestiveness of his remarks.

Professor A. Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, read a paper giving a possible method of communication between ships at sea.

Its researches into the nature of sound and the construction of the ear, the nature of light and the construction of the eye, its measurement of the speed of sensation, its localization of the functions of the brain, and its hints as to the possibility of producing a homunculus presently as the fruit of its chemical investigation of protoplasm have satisfied the souls of our atheists as completely as belief in divine omniscience and scriptural revelation satisfied the souls of their pious fathers.

The fact remains that when Young, Helmholtz, Darwin, Haeckel, and the rest, popularized here among the literate classes by Tyndall and Huxley, and among the proletariat by the lectures of the National Secular Society, have taught you all they know, you are still as utterly at a loss to explain the fact of consciousness as you would have been in the days when you were instructed from the child's guide to knowledge.

Materialism, in short, only isolated the great mystery of consciousness by clearing away several petty mysteries with which we had confused it, just as rationalism isolated the great mystery of the will to live.

The isolation made both more conspicuous than before.

It is easy to invent conundrums which dogmatic evangelicalism cannot answer.

And no doubt, whilst it was still a nine days' wonder that evangelicalism could not solve all enigmas, such invention seemed something much deeper than the mere intellectual chess play which it has seemed to be now that the nine days are past.

In his occasional weakness for such conundrums, and later on in his harping on the hereditary transmission of disease, we see Ibsen's active intellect busy, not only with the problems peculiar to his own plays, but with the fatalism and pessimism of the middle of the nineteenth century, when the typical advanced culture was attainable by reading Strauss's Leben Jesu, the popularizations of Helmholtz and Darwin by Tyndall and Huxley, and George Eliot's novels vainly protested against by Ruskin as peopled with the sweepings of a Pentonville omnibus.

The traces of this period in Ibsen's writings show how well he knew the crushing weight with which the sordid cares of the ordinary struggle for money and respectability fell on the world when the romance of the creeds was discredited, and progress seemed for the moment to mean not the growth of the spirit of man, but an effect of the survival of the fittest brought about by the destruction of the unfit.