392 THE STORY OF THE EARTH AND MAN. 



He was conscious of seeing something, conscious of 

 making sure it was a hare, conscious of desiring to 

 catch it, and therefore to loose the greyhound at the 

 right time, conscious of the acts by which he let the 

 dog out of the leash. But with practice, though the 

 various steps of the neurosis remain — for otherwise 

 the impression on the retina would not result in the 

 loosing of the dog — the great majority of the steps 

 of the psychosis vanish, and the loosing of the dog 

 follows unconsciously, or, as we say, without think- 

 ing about, upon the sight of the hare. No one will 

 deny that the series of acts which originally inter- 

 vened between the sensation- and the letting go of 

 the dog were, in the strictest sense, intellectual and 

 rational operations. Do they cease to be so when 

 the man ceases to be conscious of them ? That 

 depends upon what is the essence and what the 

 accident of these operations, which taken together 

 constitute ratiocination. Now, ratiocination is re- 

 solvable into predication, and predication consists 

 tn marking, in some way, the existence, the co- 

 existence, the succession, the likeness and unlike- 

 ness, of things or their ideas. Whatever does this, 

 reasons ; and if a machine produces the effects of 

 reason, I see no more ground for denying to it the 

 reasoning power because it is unconscious, than I see 

 for refusing to Mr. Babbage's engine the title of a 

 calculating machine on the same grounds. '^ 



Here we have in the first place, the fact that an 

 action, in the first instance rational and complex, be- 



