Scope and Purport of Evolution 59 



of feeling and a unit of motion seems to me to be 

 talking nonsense, to be combining terms which 

 severally possess a meaning into a phrase which 

 has no meaning. I am therefore inclined to think 

 that the above sentences, literally interpreted, do 

 not really convey Mr. Spencer s opinion. They 

 appear manifestly inconsistent, moreover, with other 

 passages in which he has taken much more pains 

 to explain his position. 1 In the sentence from 

 page 558 of &quot; First Principles,&quot; Mr. Spencer 

 appears to me to mean that the nerve-action, 

 which is the objective concomitant of what is 

 subjectively known as feeling, is transformable 

 into an equivalent of mechanical motion. When 

 he wrote that sentence perhaps he had not shaped 

 the case quite so distinctly in his own mind as he 

 had a few years later, when he made the more 

 elaborate statements in the second edition of the 

 Psychology. Though in these more elaborate state 

 ments he does not assert the doctrine I have here 

 maintained, yet they seem consistent with it. 

 When I was finishing the chapter on Matter and 

 Spirit, in my room in London, one afternoon in 

 February, 1874, Mr. Spencer came in, and I read 

 to him nearly the whole chapter, including my 



1 See, e. g., Principles of Psychology, second edition, vol. i. 

 pp. 158-161, 616-627. 



