I40 Luck, or Cunning ? 
cal mindless conception of the universe ; to natural selec- 
tion’s door, therefore, the blame of the whole movement in 
favour of mechanism must be justly laid. It was natural 
that those who had been foremost in preaching mindless 
designless luck as the main means of organic modification, 
should lend themselves with alacrity to the task of getting 
rid of thought and feeling from all share in the direction and 
governance of the world. Professor Huxley, as usual,.was 
among the foremost in this good work, and whether in- 
fluenced by Hobbes, or Descartes, or Mr. Spalding, or even 
by the machine chapters in ‘‘ Erewhon ” which were still 
recent, I do not know, led off with his article ‘“‘ On the 
hypothesis that animals are automata ”’ (which it may be 
observed is the exact converse of the hypothesis that, 
automata are animated) in the Fortnightly Review for 
November 1874. Professor Huxley did not say outright 
that men and women were just as living and just as dead 
as their own watches, but this was what his article came to 
in substance. The conclusion arrived at was that animals 
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. Romanes, in his Rede 
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 auto- 
mata, or machines 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 
* Contemporary Review, August, 1885, p. 84. 
