14 Unconscious Memory 



and all, and look so much as if it were alive that, whether 

 we liked it or not, we should be compelled to think it and 

 call it so ; and whether the being alive was not simply the 

 being an exceedingly complicated machine, whose parts 

 were set in motion by the action upon them of exterior 

 circumstances ; whether, in fact, man was not a kind of 

 toy-mouse in the shape of a man, only capable of going 

 for seventy or eighty years, instead of half as many seconds, 

 and as much more versatile as he is more durable ? Of 

 course I had an uneasy feehng that if I thus made all 

 plants and men into machines, these machines must have 

 what all other machines have if they are machines at all 

 — a designer, and some one to wind them up and work 

 them ; but I thought this might wait for the present, and 

 was perfectly ready then, as now, to accept a designer 

 from without, if the facts upon examination rendered 

 such a belief reasonable. 



If, then, men were not really alive after all, but were 

 only machines of so complicated a make that it was less 

 trouble to us to cut the difficulty and say that that kind of 

 mechanism was " being alive," why should not machines 

 ultimately become as complicated as we are, or at any 

 rate complicated enough to be called living, and to be 

 indeed as living as it was in the nature of anything at all 

 to be ? If it was only a case of their becoming more 

 complicated, we were certainly doing our best to make 

 them so. 



I do not suppose I at that time saw that this view 

 comes to much the same as denying that there are such 

 qualities as life and consciousness at all, and that this, 

 again, works round to the assertion of their omnipresence 

 in every molecule of matter, inasmuch as it destroys the 

 separation between the organic and inorganic, and main- 

 tains that whatever the organic is the inorganic is also. 

 Deny it in theory as much as we please, we shall still al- 

 ways feel that an organic body, unless dead, is living and 

 conscious to a greater or less degree. Therefore, if we 



