Ring to some degree his father’s hostility to Roman Catholicism. How, then, did he depart from his father’s Y-27632 web religion to develop a very different religious perspective that included the rejection of many aspects of organized religion? That is the main thrust of this paper. However, in tracing his changing attitudes to Torin 1 web various aspects of religion, it will become apparent that such terms as atheist, pantheist and agnostic are inadequate descriptions of Tyndall’s views, which demand a far more nuanced and historically sensitive analysis.*[email protected] 2015 The Author(s) Published by the Royal Society.G. CantorThe evidence presented here is gleaned from letters and journal entries4 that Tyndall wrote between May 1840, when he was posted by the Ordnance Survey of Ireland to Youghal, County Cork, and October 1848, when he left England for Marburg to work in the laboratory of Robert Bunsen. Stephen Kim calls this early part of his life his years of `study and apprenticeship’.5 Thus we shall be concerned primarily with a period spanning about eight and a half years. Although the year of his birth is not known with certainty, Tyndall was about 18 years old at the start of this period and about 27 when he left for Marburg.6 During that time he matured greatly: at the start he had just moved away from home, and his father still exerted a significant influence on him; they shared approximately similar views on politics and religion. By October 1848 not only had he emigrated from Ireland and spent more than five years working as a surveyor in England, but he had also substantially reassessed both his political and his religious views. As this paper is concerned with Tyndall’s changing attitudes to religion, it necessarily engages the wider issue of how individuals develop cognitively, emotionally and religiously. Although a substantial literature exists on this subject,7 Carl Jung’s notion of individuation provides a helpful framework and vocabulary for characterizing Tyndall’s changing religious identity during the period under discussion. For Jung and his followers the process of individuation is marked by such indicators as the maturity of the person’s attitudes and assumptions, the quality of the relationships that he or she maintains and his or her ability to act in accordance with his or her disposition as an autonomous individual. Although individuation may be a long-term continuous process, Jung divided it into three stages that often overlap. The first stage involves containment and nurturing, principally by the real or symbolic mother, thus enabling the child to gain an increasing degree of physical and emotional autonomy. In the second (`adapting/adjusting’) stage, which usually begins at around the time of puberty, the figure of the father plays the leading symbolic role. To cope with the challenges of being an autonomous person in an often hostile world, the youth adopts the norms instilled by parents and by society at large (often with some testing of the boundaries) so as to fit into the community. By contrast, the third and final stage of individuation is marked by centring and integration: `The task in this stage of life . . . is . . . to become a centred and whole individual who is related to the transcendent as well as the immediate concrete realities of human existence.’ The individual now strives for–and to some degree achieves–an awareness of self that separates that person from his or her socially adapted persona.8.Ring to some degree his father’s hostility to Roman Catholicism. How, then, did he depart from his father’s religion to develop a very different religious perspective that included the rejection of many aspects of organized religion? That is the main thrust of this paper. However, in tracing his changing attitudes to various aspects of religion, it will become apparent that such terms as atheist, pantheist and agnostic are inadequate descriptions of Tyndall’s views, which demand a far more nuanced and historically sensitive analysis.*[email protected] 2015 The Author(s) Published by the Royal Society.G. CantorThe evidence presented here is gleaned from letters and journal entries4 that Tyndall wrote between May 1840, when he was posted by the Ordnance Survey of Ireland to Youghal, County Cork, and October 1848, when he left England for Marburg to work in the laboratory of Robert Bunsen. Stephen Kim calls this early part of his life his years of `study and apprenticeship’.5 Thus we shall be concerned primarily with a period spanning about eight and a half years. Although the year of his birth is not known with certainty, Tyndall was about 18 years old at the start of this period and about 27 when he left for Marburg.6 During that time he matured greatly: at the start he had just moved away from home, and his father still exerted a significant influence on him; they shared approximately similar views on politics and religion. By October 1848 not only had he emigrated from Ireland and spent more than five years working as a surveyor in England, but he had also substantially reassessed both his political and his religious views. As this paper is concerned with Tyndall’s changing attitudes to religion, it necessarily engages the wider issue of how individuals develop cognitively, emotionally and religiously. Although a substantial literature exists on this subject,7 Carl Jung’s notion of individuation provides a helpful framework and vocabulary for characterizing Tyndall’s changing religious identity during the period under discussion. For Jung and his followers the process of individuation is marked by such indicators as the maturity of the person’s attitudes and assumptions, the quality of the relationships that he or she maintains and his or her ability to act in accordance with his or her disposition as an autonomous individual. Although individuation may be a long-term continuous process, Jung divided it into three stages that often overlap. The first stage involves containment and nurturing, principally by the real or symbolic mother, thus enabling the child to gain an increasing degree of physical and emotional autonomy. In the second (`adapting/adjusting’) stage, which usually begins at around the time of puberty, the figure of the father plays the leading symbolic role. To cope with the challenges of being an autonomous person in an often hostile world, the youth adopts the norms instilled by parents and by society at large (often with some testing of the boundaries) so as to fit into the community. By contrast, the third and final stage of individuation is marked by centring and integration: `The task in this stage of life . . . is . . . to become a centred and whole individual who is related to the transcendent as well as the immediate concrete realities of human existence.’ The individual now strives for–and to some degree achieves–an awareness of self that separates that person from his or her socially adapted persona.8.
