458 The Doctrine of Evolution. 



there are statements which either imply or distinctly assert 

 that motion can be transformed into feeling and thought 

 e. g., " Those modes of the Unknowable which we call heat, 

 light, chemical affinity, etc., are alike transformable into each 

 other, and into those modes of the Unknowable which we 

 distinguish as sensation, emotion, thought ; these, in their 

 turns, being directly or indirectly retransformable into the 

 original shapes " (First Principles, second edition, 1867, p. 

 217) ; and again it is said " to be a necessary deduction from 

 the law of correlation, that what exists in consciousness un- 

 der the form of feeling is transformable into an equivalent 

 of mechanical motion," etc. (First Principles, second edi- 

 tion, p. 558). Now, if this, as literally interpreted, be Mr. 

 Spencer's deliberate opinion, I entirely dissent from it. To 

 speak of quantitative equivalence between a unit 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, in- 

 clined 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 

 (e. g., Principles of Psychology, vol. i, pp. 158-161, 616-627). 

 In the sentence from p. 558 of First Principles, Mr. Spencer 

 appears to me to mean that the nerve-action, which is the 

 objective concomitant of what is subjectively known as feel- 

 ing, is transformable into an equivalent of mechanical mo- 

 tion. 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 statements 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 argument from correlation 

 above mentioned. He expressed warm approval of the 

 chapter, without making any specific qualifications. In the 

 course of the chapter I had occasion to quote a passage from 

 the Psychology (vol. i, p. 158 ; cf . Cosmic Philosophy, vol. ii, 

 p. 444), in which Mr. Spencer twice inadvertently used the 

 phrase " nervous shock " where he meant " psychical shock." 

 As his object was to keep the psychical phenomena and 



