200 The Science of Life. 



in the creatures ". So strongly was this view engrained 

 that attempts at analysis were frowned upon as materia- 

 listic or irreligious, and Groos notices that fear of the 

 Sorbonne's disapprobation led Leroy to publish his 

 famous Letters on Animals as if from "a physician of 

 Nuremberg ". 



Closely allied to the theological interpretation is that 

 of various metaphysicians who have interested them- 

 Metaphysicai se l yes m tne psychological aspects of animal 

 interpreta- life. Thus Schelling, who had a strong 

 influence on German biology, said that 

 " animals in their works and ways were but expressions 

 or instruments of the universally immanent reason, 

 without being themselves reasonable. Only in what 

 they do is there reason, but not in themselves." Of 

 this position, too, there are modern representatives, for 

 instance, E. von Hartmann, who, while perfectly aware 

 of the suggested scientific interpretations, finds satis- 

 faction in none, and falls back upon his metaphysical 

 principle of " the Unconscious ". 



The extreme of reaction from metaphysical interpre- 

 tation is to be found in the Cartesian doctrine that 

 Animal animals are automata. As Huxley has told 



Automatism. us ^ Descartes was an unwearied dissector 

 and observer, "a physiologist of the first rank", who 

 did for the nervous system what Harvey had done for 

 the heart and blood-vessels. He recognized that the 

 brain was the organ of mental processes, that muscular 

 contraction is (usually) dependent on nervous stimuli, 

 that there are sensory and motor nerves, that reflex 

 actions may take place without volition or even con- 

 trary to it, and he held an almost modern theory of 

 memory. 



Starting from reflex actions in man, co-ordinate and 

 purposive, though unwilled and unconscious, Descartes 

 argued that animal activities might be of a similar 

 nature, though doubtless requiring in most cases a 

 more refined and complicated nervous mechanism. As 

 Huxley puts it, almost quoting, as he points out, from 

 Malebranche's statement of the Cartesian doctrine, 

 "what proof is there that brutes are other than a 



