52 LEISURE-TIME STUDIES. 



highest animals, including man himself, may be said to 

 acquire a knowledge of their surroundings in an exactly 

 similar manner. When we talk of exercising our senses, 

 or when, to use the comprehensive term, we speak of 

 " feeling," we are simply expressing the idea of obtaining 

 a certain knowledge of our environments, and as a result, 

 we are further enabled to act upon that knowledge in ways 

 and fashions relative thereto. 



Some such ideas as those just stated, have given rise to 

 the conception widely known and discussed in these latter 

 days under the name of the "automatic doctrine" that 

 the acts of all animals, including those of man, " the paragon 

 of animals," as Hamlet terms him, bear in reality a much 

 closer relation to their surroundings than they are generally 

 supposed to possess. The simple acts of a hydra's life, 

 and the most intricate operations of the human mind ; the 

 nervous action which enables a polype to obtain a particle 

 of food, and the nerve-changes evolving thoughts which 

 emanate from minds like those of Goethe, Shakespeare, 

 Newton, and Milton, and which will re-echo in the minds 

 of men throughout all time, are thus held to present, when 

 analysed out to their fullest extent, a striking community of 

 origin. The polype is said to be really an " automaton," in 

 that it simply acts through its nervous powers as these powers 

 are first acted upon by outer impressions ; and man must also 

 be held as sharing this automaton nature, since his acts are 

 determined in like manner by outward circumstances, and 

 simply by the succession or order in which these circum- 

 stances have been impressed upon his nervous centres. 

 "The question is," as Dr. Carpenter has expressed it, 

 "whether the Ego is completely under the necessary do- 

 mination of his original or inherited tendencies, modified 

 by subsequent education ; or whether he possesses within 

 himself any power of directing and controlling these 

 tendencies." Or as the case is put by Professor Huxley,. 

 " Descartes' line of argument is perfectly clear. He starts 

 from reflex action in man from the unquestionable fact 



