■IS8 LUCK, OR CUNNING?- 



were automata; true, they were probably sentient, still 

 they were automata pure and simple, mere sentient 

 pieces of exceedingly elaborate clockwork, and nothing 

 more. 



"Professor Huxley," says Mr. Eomanes, in his 

 Eede Lecture for 1885,* "argues by way of perfectly 

 logical deduction from this statement, that thought and 

 feeling have nothing to do with determining action ; 

 they are merely the bye-products of cerebration, or, 

 as he expresses it, the indices of changes which are 

 going on in the brain. Under this view we are all 

 what he terms conscious automata, or machiaes which 

 happen, as it were by chance, to be conscious' of some 

 of their own movements. But the consciousness is 

 altogether adventitious, and bears the same ineffectual 

 relation to the activity of the brain as a steam whistle 

 bears to the activity of a locomotive, or the striking 

 of a clock to the time-keeping adjustments of the 

 clockwork. Here, again, we meet with an echo of 

 Hobbes, who opens his work on the commonwealth 

 with these words : — 



" ' Nature, the art whereby God hath made and 

 governs the world, is by the art of man, as in many other 

 things, in this alSo imitated, that it can make an artifi- 

 cial animal. For seeing life is but a motion of limbs, the 

 beginning whereof is in the principal part within ; why 

 may we not say that all automata (engines that move 

 themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) 

 have an artificial life ? For what is the heart but a 

 spring, and the nerves but so many strings; and the 

 * OovieiKporwry Review, August 1885, p. 84. 



