IS6 LUCK, OR CUNNING? 



may regret it, but cannot help it ; having set up as 

 thinkerg we have got to think, and must adhere to the 

 only conditions under which thought is possible ; life, 

 therefore, must be life, all life, and nothiag but life, 

 and so with death, free will, necessity, design, and 

 everything else. This, at least, is how philosophers 

 must think concerning them in theory; in practice, 

 however, not even John Stuart Mill himself could 

 eliminate all taint of its opposite from any one of these 

 things, any more than Lady Macbeth could clear her 

 hand of blood ; indeed, the more nearly we think we have 

 succeeded the more certain are we to find ourselves 

 ere long mocked and baffled ; and this, I take it, is 

 what our biologists began in the autumn of 1879 to 

 discover had happened to themselves. 



Por some years they had been trying to get rid of 

 feeling, consciousness, and mind generally, from active 

 participation in the evolution of the universe. They 

 admitted, indeed, that feeling and consciousness attend 

 the working of the world's gear, as noise attends the 

 working of a steam-engine, but they would not allow 

 that consciousness produced more effect in the working 

 of the world than noise on that of the steam-engine. 

 Feeling and noise were alike accidental unessential 

 adjuncts and nothing more. Incredible as it may 

 seem to those who are happy enough not to know that 

 this attempt is an old one, they were trying to reduce 

 the world to the level of a piece of unerring though 

 sentient mechanism. Men and animals must be 

 allowed to feel and even to reflect ; this much must 

 be conceded, but granted that they do, still (so, at 



