THE LIMITS OF HUMAN AUTOMATISM. 305 



we compare this acceptation with the sense we attach to the very 

 same words when applied (figuratively) to a piece of pure mechan 

 ism. If I say that my watch goes &quot;right,&quot; I do not assign to it 

 any moral credit, but merely mean that it keeps time well. And 

 if I say that it goes &quot; wrong,&quot; I do not speak of it as an object of 

 blame, but merely mean that it wants regulating. 



If the &quot; wrong &quot; movement of the self-acting points of a railway 

 gives such a direction to the train which passes over them as 

 causes a terrible sacrifice of life, we do not imply by our use of 

 the word the moral criminality with which we charge a pointsman 

 whose drunken carelessness has brought about a similar calamity. 

 The machine could not help acting as it did ; we assume that the 

 pointsman could. If the machine proves to have been ill-con 

 structed, or to have got out of order by neglect, we blame the man 

 whom we believe to have been in fault ; but if its working was 

 deranged by a snow-storm of unprecedented violence, we cannot 

 say that any one is chargeable with moral &quot; wrong.&quot; So, if the 

 pointsman can excuse himself by showing that he had been on duty 

 for eight-and-forty hours continuously, and did not know what he 

 was about, we shift the blame on the directors who wrongly over 

 taxed his brain ; whilst, if it turns out that his inattention was due, 

 neither to drunkenness nor to over-fatigue, but to sudden illness, 

 we cannot say that any one was in fault But, on the automatist 

 theory, the pointsman could no more help getting drunk, than, 

 when drunk, he could help neglecting his work ; and the railway- 

 directors could no more help keeping the pointsman on duty for 

 forty-eight hours, than he could help the bewilderment which was 

 caused by this overstrain of his power. And, neither the drunken 

 pointsman nor the reckless directors were any more morally 

 responsible for the loss of life, in the one case, than were the self- 

 atting points in the other: each being a machine whose movements 

 were determined by the law of its construction and the conditions 

 in which it was placed ; and the term &quot;wrong,&quot; as applied to the 

 action of the man, having no other meaning than it has when 



this he seems to me implicitly to recognize that direction of bodily action by the 

 mind of the K^o, which in his previous lecture he distinctly denied (an(f t p. 290) ; 

 and, whiUt still upholding the principle of uniformity of sequence, to surrender 

 all that essentially constitutes automatism. 



