The Attempt to Eliminate Mind 1 39 
must adhere to the only conditions under which thought is 
possible ; life, therefore, must be life, all life, and nothing 
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. 
For 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 least, it was contended) it has no 
effect upon the result ; it does not matter as far as this is 
concerned whether they feel and think or not ; everything 
would go on exactly as it does and always has done, though 
neither man nor beast knew nor felt anything at all. It is 
only by maintaining things like this that people will get 
pensions out of the British public. 
Some such position as this is a sine gud non for the Neo- 
Darwinistic doctrine of natural selection, which, as Von 
Hartmann justly observes, involves an essentially mechani- 
