THE AUTOMATON HYPOTHESIS 359 



activities of the higher animals, including man. To the student 

 of evolution, who realizes the extreme parsimony of nature, and the 

 universality of adaptation, such a notion, Huxley notwithstanding, 

 should be unbelievable. 1 



598. Common sense tells me that there is at this moment a cup 

 of coffee on my table, which I see and smell, because I have material 

 eyes and a material nose, but which I would neither see nor smell if 

 I had lost the eyes and nose. I become conscious of a desire to drink, 

 and, apparently because of that desire, my hand, a thing as material 

 as my brain, goes out and seizes the cup. I drink with a material 

 body, and feel a satisfaction which is mental. My entire life is 

 filled with such convincing experiences, and so, as far as I am able 

 to judge, is the life of every one else. At any rate, the evidence is 

 such that every human being over the age of a few weeks, and I 

 think every conscious animal that can think at all, is convinced, in 

 effect, that mind and body influence one another that, for example, 

 he can move his body at will, and that when his body is injured he 

 suffers pain as a consequence. The whole of our private and public 

 conduct, the entire structure of the family and of society, is founded 

 on this belief that mental and bodily actions are not links in separate 

 chains of events, but links in the same chain. Thus we bestow 

 material gifts, seek to please those we love, and imprison and even 

 hang men who have consciously broken the law whose minds, as 

 we suppose, have influenced their bodies. But we do not punish or 

 even blame a man when he unconsciously develops a cancer which 

 offends sight and smell, or an infectious disease which starts a 

 destructive epidemic. Continually, therefore, we blame the mind 

 for the doings of the body, and punish the body for the doings of 

 the mind. 



599. In fact, given the existence of the body, then, as far as the 

 evidence goes, there is nothing in the whole range of experience so 

 certain apparently as that mind and body affect one another. It 

 is not the lack of evidence that is the obstacle to belief, but the 

 difficulty of conceiving \uzvr a material thing can affect an immaterial 

 thing, and vice versa. But matter itself is inconceivable. Having 

 swallowed the camel, we have no right to put on .an air of 

 delicate discrimination and strain at the gnat. When evidence is 

 massive and apparently conclusive as it is in this case, if any- 

 where the probabilities are that the apparent inconceivability of 

 a thing is due, not to its non-existence, but to our mental limita- 

 tions to our ignorance, lack of the right perceptive powers, and 



1 See James, Principles of Psychology, vol. i. pp. 138-144. 



