196 Paradoxical character of Automatism. CHAP. 



and monstrous. If Automatism is true, then con- 

 sciousness is mere surplusage, and not a cause, but 

 only a sign, of physical action ; and all human history 

 might, without violation of any law of causation, 

 have gone on in unconsciousness; the development 

 of art, science, and faith might have appeared to go 

 on with unconscious puppets for actors, without a 

 throb of pain or a glow of pleasure ; wars might have 

 been waged without ambition, pictures painted and 

 statues carved without a sense of beauty, music com- 

 posed and performed without a sense of harmony, 

 science built up without a love of truth, and prayer 

 uttered without hope or fear all as the result of 

 nervous action never translating itself into conscious- 

 ness. 1 Rather than assent to such a paradox as this, 

 I should believe with Sir John Herschel, what is 

 scarcely a paradox at all, that the Will has the power 

 of creating energy to an innnitesimally small amount ; 

 though, as I have shown, I do not think this is 

 necessary to a belief in the freedom and self-deter- 

 mining power of the Will. 



It may be said that a redudio ad absurdum, however 

 forcible, is worth little outside the domain of pure 



1 This is not my redudio ad absurdum of automatism ; it is 

 the statement of automatists themselves. Lange says: "All 

 the acts and movements of mankind, of individual persons as 

 well as of nations, might go on exactly as they do now, though 

 nothing resembling a thought or a sensation were to occur in 

 any one of those individuals." Quoted from Lange's "Ge- 

 schichte des Materialismus " in Kennedy's Natural Theology and 

 Modern Thought, p. 74. See the conclusion of this chapter. 



