298 THE FUTURE OF RELIGION AND MORALS. 



move himself, he is not even moved hither and thither 

 by the force of conscious motives, as the necessitarians 

 hitherto believed ; he is not moved by the love of power, 

 or wealth, or fame ; he is moved in each instance simply 

 as certain mechanical forces shall settle it amongst them- 

 selves. He goes as they direct, fancying all the time that 

 he is free, or at least that he is following a motive, a part 

 of what he calls himself. 



This doctrine would certainly destroy freedom of will 

 and freedom of action, in a sense far more deep than was 

 ever dreamed of by any necessitarian, who merely 

 affirmed, like Mill, that t our volitions followed motives 

 conscious motives, related finally to our pleasures and 

 pains. In the desire to reduce everything to physico- 

 chemical causes, and in particular to universalize the law 

 of the conservation and transmutation of energy, this is 

 the hopeless pass to which our physicists bring the 

 science of man and philosophy in these days. Thought, 

 consciousness, is not a physical energy, therefore, to be 

 logical, it is nothing or next to nothing, for the universe 

 is made up of matter and physical energy. At best, con- 

 sciousness is nothing very particular, an accident that 

 turned up amongst the other transmuted things, not a 

 lawful physical product, but, as Professor Tyndall has 

 termed it, a " bye-product," no way essential to the purely 

 physical processes going on in the brain. Thought is not 

 even a cause, it is at most a spectator looking idly on ; a 

 state of consciousness is only, according to Professor 

 Huxley, a sort of symbol of the dark mysterious move- 

 ments of the atoms taking place behind, but which, 

 though its true cause, it no more resembles than the 

 registration of the hour on the face of the clock resembles 

 the inner movement of the machinery which really 

 causes it. 



