120 THE CREED OF SCIENCE, EELIGIOUS AND MORAL. 



True, the effects are unlike the causes; a volition, a 

 thought, an impulse is wholly unlike its physico- 

 chemical cause. But the same might be said in every 

 case of cause and effect; and just as oxygen and hydrogen 

 produce water a wholly unlike phenomenon ; just as 

 a special combination of atoms may have the unlike 

 phenomenon of life annexed to them ; so particular 

 arrangements and movements of the cerebral cells and 

 fibres may have, as product or resultant, the wholly 

 unlike phenomenon, an emotion, volition, or thought. 



Man is, in fact, a machine, an automaton. Descartes 

 was right in affirming this of the brutes; he was only 

 wrong in arbitrarily severing them from men a position 

 no longer tenable since Darwin's discoveries. Man, too, is 

 a machine, only the most skilfully constructed of all that 

 Nature has produced. He is a machine, and, moreover, 

 a locomotive machine, moved by the internal mechanical 

 forces generated within from the fuel supplied by the 

 food consumed. He is not moved hither and thither 

 by the directive agency of a spiritual entity called 

 self, supposed to be different from the material forces, 

 yet to be in some indescribable local relation to them, 

 and also to be capable of moving and wielding them. 

 There is, indeed, no such self discoverable, no such direct- 

 ing spiritual agency. There is a thing called conscious- 

 ness; there is a mass of conscious impulses and principles 

 of action ; but all these are themselves products of the 

 physical energies. When we think we have made a 

 prudential resolve as to a line of action, our resolve and 

 our prudence are alike products of a particular position 

 of the cerebral atoms the final source and seat of 

 prudence and resolution, as of all other conscious facts. 



The human animal is also the human machine, 

 and in strictness is only a machine. There are no facts 



