AUTOMATON-THEORY. IBS' 



pounds, more or less, of warmish albuminoid matter called 

 Martin Luther, without ever implying that it felt. 



But, on the other hand, nothing in all this could pre- 

 vent us from giving an equally complete account of either 

 Luther's or Shakespeare's spiritual history, an account ia 

 which every gleam of thought and emotion should find its 

 place. The mind-history would run alongside of the body- 

 history of each man, and each point in the one would cor- 

 respond to, but not react upon, a point in the other. So- 

 the melody floats from the harp-string, but neither checks 

 nor quickens its vibrations ; so the shadow runs alongside 

 the pedestrian, but in no way influences his steps. 



Another inference, apparently more paradoxical still,, 

 needs to be made, though, as far as I am aware, Dr. Hodg- 

 son is the only writer who has explicitly drawn it. That 

 inference is that feelings, not causing nerve-actions, cannot 

 even cause each other. To ordinary common sense, felt 

 pain is, as such, not only the cause of outward tears and 

 cries, but also the cause of such inward events as sorrow, 

 compunction, desire, or inventive thought. So the con- 

 sciousness of good news is the direct producer of the feel- 

 ing of joy, the awareness of premises that of the belief in 

 conclusions. But according to the automaton-theory, each 

 of the feelings mentioned is onh' the correlate of some nerve- 

 movement whose cause lay wholly in a 23re\dous nerve-move- 

 ment. The first nerve-movement called up the second ;, 

 whatever feeling was attached to the second consequently" 

 found itself following upon the feeling that was attached 

 to the first. If, for example, good news was the conscious- 

 ness correlated with the first movement, then joy turned 

 out to be the correlate in consciousness of the second. 

 But all the while the items of the nerve series were the 

 only ones in causal continuity ; the items of the conscious 

 series, however inwardly rational their sequence, were 

 simply juxtaposed. 



REASONS FOR THE THEORY. 



The * conscious automaton-theory,' as this conception is- 

 generally called, is thus a radical and simple conception of 

 the manner in which certain facts may possibly occur. But 



