AUTOMATON-THEORY. 131 



A few sentences from Huxley and Clifford may be sub- 

 joined to make the matter entirely clear. Professor Huxley 

 says: 



"The consciousness of brutes would appear to be related to the 

 mechanism of their body simply as a collateral product of its working, 

 and to be as completely without any power of modifying that working 

 as the steam-whistle which accompanies the work of a locomotive engine 

 is v,'ithout influence on its machinery. Their volition, if they have any, 

 is an emotion indicative of physical changes, not a cause of such changes. 

 . . . Tlie soul stands related to the body as the bell of a clock to the works, 

 and consciousness answers to the sound which the bell gives out when 

 it is struck. . . . Thus far I have strictly confined myself to the 

 automatism of brutes. ... It is quite true that, to the best of my 

 judgment, the argumentation which applies to brutes holds equally 

 good of men ; and, therefore, that all states of consciousness in us, as 

 in them, are immediately caused by molecular changes of the brain-sub- 

 stance. It seems to me that in men, as in brutes, there is no proof that 

 any state of consciousness is the cause of change in the motion of the 

 matter of the organism. If these positions aie well based, it follows 

 that our mental conditions are simply the symbols in consciousness of 

 the changes which take place automatically in the organism ; and that, 

 to take an extreme illusti'ation, the feeling we call volition is not the 

 cause of a voluntary act, but the symbol of that state of the brain which 

 is the immediate cause of that act. We are conscious automata." 



Professor Cliiford writes : 



' ' All the evidence that we have goes to show that the physical world 

 gets along entirely by itself, according to practically universal rules. 

 . . , The train of physical facts between the stimulus sent into the eye, 

 or to any one of our senses, and the exertion which follows it, and the 

 train of physical facts which goes on in the brain, even when there is 

 no stimulus and no exertion,— these are perfectly complete physical 

 trams, and every step is fully accounted for by mechanical conditions. 

 . . . The two things are on utterly different platforms — the physical 

 facts go along by themselves, and the mental facts go along by them- 

 selves. There is a parallelism between them, but there is no interfer- 

 ence of one with the other. Again, if anybody says that the will 

 influences matter, the statement is not untrue, but it is nonsense. Such 

 an assertion belongs to the crude materialism of the savage. The only 



derived from the entirely heterogeneous universe of Feeling. Spencer, 

 Hodgson (in his Time and Space), M<auds]e}^ Lockhart Clarke, Bain, Dr. 

 Carpenter, and otlier antliors were cited as having been guilty of the con- 

 fusion. The writing was soon sto]iped because he perceived that the view 

 which he was upholding against these authors was a pure conception, with 

 no proofs to be adduced of its realit3^ Later it seemed to him that what- 

 ever p?'(?o/s existed really told in favor of their view. 



