THE MEDIAEVAL ATTITUDE 



and Descartes, in a tentative way, even attempted the 

 explanation of life on the same basis. He advanced 

 the idea of animal automatism, according to which 

 the motions and sensations of animals are the result of 

 mechanical stimuli and not of intelligence and will. 

 He even asserted that animals, being machines, felt 

 no pain. This part of his theory fell dead until it was 

 revived by Huxley who, rather as a tour de force, 

 instanced a number of experiments to prove that 

 many organic actions are automatic. Huxley's re- 

 vival of Cartesianism was apparently for the purpose 

 of propaganda, to lead others to adopt the monistic 

 theory, or at least to discredit the total separation of 

 the organic from the inorganic. This opinion seems 

 probable because Huxley himself goes only to the 

 brink of monism and then draws back with the decla- 

 ration that he believes in a separate spiritual world; 

 only, as he cannot understand spiritual phenomena, 

 he will reason as if they do not exist. Descartes thus 

 extended the principle of mechanistic monism from 

 the inorganic world to include plants and animals; 

 but, at this point, he made a break by adding a soul 

 to man, just as Huxley proposed a break in natural 

 evolution at the point when man attained self-con- 

 sciousness and the power of inhibition. It is not an ar- 

 bitrary assumption to harmonize thus the soul of 

 Descartes and the self-consciousness of Huxley. In 

 fact, we can be certain that somewhere in the argu- 

 ment of the monist, he has slipped in a factor which 



C 103 ] 



