we have begun to travel the downward path of thought, we ask ourselves questions about life and death, ego and non ego, object and subject, necessity and free will, and other kindred subjects. We want to know where we are, and in the hope of simplifying matters, strip, as it were, each subject to the skin, and finding that even this has not freed it from all extraneous matter, flay it alive in the hope that if we grub down deep enough we shall come upon it in its pure unalloyed state free from all inconvenient complication through intermixture with anything alien to itself. Then, indeed, we can docket it, and pigeon-hole it for what it is; but what can we do with it till we have got it pure? We want to account for things, which means that we want to know to which of the various accounts opened in our mental ledger we ought to carry them-and how can we do this if we admit a phenomenon to be neither one thing nor the other, but to belong to half a dozen different accounts in proportions which often cannot even approximately be determined? If we are to keep accounts we must keep them in reasonable compass; and if keeping them within reasonable compass involves something of a Procrustean arrangement, we may regret it, but cannot help it; having set up as thinkers we have got to think, and must adhere to the only conditions under which thought is possible; life, therefore, must be life, all life, and nothing but life, and so with death, free will, necessity, design, and everything else. This, at least, is how philosophers must think concerning them in theory; in practice, however, not even John Stuart Mill himself could eliminate all taint of its opposite from any one of these things, any more than Lady Macbeth could clear her hand of blood; indeed, the more nearly we think we have succeeded the more certain are we to find ourselves ere long mocked and baffled; and this, I take it, is what our biologists began in the autumn of 1879 to discover had happened to themselves.

For some years they had been trying to get rid of feeling, consciousness, and mind generally, from active participation in the evolution of the universe. They admitted, indeed,

that feeling and consciousness attend the working of the world's gear, as noise attends the working of a steam-engine, but they would not allow that consciousness produced more effect in the working of the world than noise on that of the Steam-engine. Feeling and noise were alike accidental unessential adjuncts and nothing more. Incredible as it may seem to those who are happy enough not to know that this attempt is an old one, they were trying to reduce the world to the level of a piece of unerring though sentient mechanism. Men and animals must be allowed to feel and even to reflect; this much must be conceded, but granted that they do, still (so, at least, it was contended) it has no effect upon the result; it does not matter as far as this is concerned whether they feel and think or not; everything would go on exactly as it does and always has done, though neither man nor beast knew nor felt anything at all. It is only by maintaining things like this that people will get pensions out of the British public.

Some such position as this is a sine qua non for the neoDarwinistic doctrine of natural selection, which, as Von Hartmann justly observes, involves an essentially mechanical mindless conception of the universe; to natural selection's door, therefore, the blame of the whole movement in favour of mechanism must be justly laid. It was natural that those who had been foremost in preaching mindless designless luck as the main means of organic modification, should lend themselves with alacrity to the task of getting rid of thought and feeling from all share in the direction and governance of the world. Professor Huxley, as usual, was among the foremost in this good work, and whether influenced by Hobbes, or Descartes, or Mr. Spalding, or even by the machine chapters in Erewhon which were still recent, I do not know, led off with his article "On the hypothesis that animals are automata (which it may be observed is the exact converse of the hypothesis that automata are animated) in the Fortnightly Review for November 1874. Professor Huxley did not say outright that men and women were just

as living and just as dead as their own watches, but this was what his article came to in substance. The conclusion arrived at was that animals were automata; true, they were probably sentient, still they were automata pure and simple, mere sentient pieces of exceedingly elaborate clockwork, and nothing more.

"Professor Huxley," says Mr. Romanes, in his Rede Lecture for 1885,1 argues by way of perfectly logical deduction from this statement, that thought and feeling have nothing to do with determining action; they are merely the by-products of cerebration, or, as he expresses it, the indices of changes which are going on in the brain. Under this view we are all what he terms conscious automata, or machines which happen, as it were by chance, to be conscious of some of their own movements. But the consciousness is altogether adventitious, and bears the same ineffectual relation to the activity of the brain as a steam whistle bears to the activity of a locomotive, or the striking of a clock to the time-keeping adjustments of the clockwork. Here, again, we meet with an echo of Hobbes, who opens his work on the commonwealth with these words:

"Nature, the art whereby God hath made and governs the world, is by the art of man, as in many other things, in this also imitated, that it can make an artificial animal. For seeing life is but a motion of limbs, the beginning whereof is in the principal part within; why may we not say that all automata (engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life? For what is the heart but a spring, and the nerves but so many strings; and the joints but so many wheels giving motion to the whole body, such as was intended by the artificer?'

"Now this theory of conscious automatism is not merely a legitimate outcome of the theory that nervous changes are the causes of mental changes, but it is logically the only possible outcome. Nor do I see any way in which this theory can be fought on grounds of physiology."

In passing, I may say the theory that living beings are conscious machines, can be fought just as much and just as little as the theory that machines are unconscious living beings; everything that goes to prove either of these propositions goes just as well to prove the other also. But I have perhaps already said as much as is necessary on this head; the main point with which I am concerned is the fact that Professor Huxley was trying to expel consciousness and sentience from any causative action in the working of the universe. In the following month appeared the late Professor Clifford's hardly less outspoken article, "Body and Mind," to the same effect, also in the Fortnightly Review, then edited by Mr. John Morley. Perhaps this view attained its frankest expression in an article by the late Mr. Spalding, which appeared in Nature, 2nd August 1877; the following extracts will show that Mr. Spalding must be credited with not playing fast and loose with his own conclusions, and knew both how to think a thing out to its extreme consequences, and how to put those consequences clearly before his readers. Mr. Spalding said:

'Against Mr. Lewes's proposition that the movements of living beings are prompted and guided by feeling, I urged that... the amount and direction of every nervous discharge must depend solely on physical conditions. And I contended that to see this clearly is to see that when we speak of movement being guided by feeling, we use the language of a less advanced stage of enlightenment. This view has since occupied a good deal of attention. Under the name of automatism it has been advocated by Professor Huxley, and with firmer logic by Professor Clifford.... In the minds of our savage ancestors feeling was the source of all movement.

...

Using the word feeling in its ordinary sense... we assert not only that no evidence can be given that feeling ever does guide or prompt action, but that the process of its doing so is inconceivable. [Italics mine.] How can we picture to ourselves a state of consciousness putting in motion any particle of matter, large or small? Puss, while dozing before the fire, hears a light

rustle in the corner, and darts towards the spot. What has happened? Certain sound-waves have reached the ear, a series of physical changes have taken place within the organism, special groups of muscles have been called into play, and the body of the cat has changed its position on the floor. Is it asserted that this chain of physical changes is not at all points complete and sufficient in itself?"

I have been led to turn to this article of Mr. Spalding's by Mr. Stewart Duncan, who, in his Conscious Matter,1 quotes the latter part of the foregoing extract. Mr. Duncan goes on to quote passages from Professor Tyndall's utterances of about the same date which show that he too took much the same line-namely, that there is no causative connection between mental and physical processes; from this it is obvious he must have supposed that physical processes would go on just as well if there were no accompaniment of feeling and consciousness at all.

I have said enough to show that in the decade, roughly, between 1870 and 1880 the set of opinion among our leading biologists was strongly against mind, as having in any way influenced the development of animal and vegetable life, and it is not likely to be denied that the prominence which the mindless theory of natural selection had assumed in men's thoughts since 1860 was one of the chief reasons, if not the chief, for the turn opinion was taking. Our leading biologists had staked so heavily upon natural selection from among fortuitous variations that they would have been more than human if they had not caught at everything that seemed to give it colour and support. It was while this mechanical fit was upon them, and in the closest connection with it, that the protoplasm boom developed. It was doubtless felt that if the public could be got to dislodge life, consciousness, and mind from any considerable part of the body, it would be no hard matter to dislodge it, presently, from the remainder; on this the deceptiveness of mind as a causative agent, and the sufficiency of a purely automatic London, David Bogue, 1881, p. 60.

1