280 



SCIENCE. 



ing paper that a distinguished public man had arrived in 

 San Francisco late in the evening, and, fatigued with his 

 journey, had retired at seven o'clock, would give the 

 Eastern reader a sense of the utter strangeness ot keeping 

 a time three hours different from local time. 



Any action for the establishment of standards of time 

 over the country must begin by securing the active 

 cooperation of the telegraph companies. The most in- 

 fluential of these companies has been traditionally public- 

 spirited in allowing the use of its wires for scientific pur- 

 poses, often at considerable expense to itself. The ser- 

 vice of transmitting time occupies at present such an ex- 

 tremely small proportion of its ordinary business that the 

 company has not as yet an officer of its service empow- 

 ered to carry out the details necessary for such time-distri- 

 butions as have been already discussed. If, however, the 

 committees referred to could prepare a scheme that was 

 thoroughly practical, and agree upon a uniformity of de- 

 tails which should not seriously interfere with the or- 

 dinary business of this or any other company, it is be- 

 lieved that the company would find it to their own inter 

 est to establish a regular system of procedure to govern 

 their action in the case of observatories in different parts 

 of the country which desire to secure their services in 

 transmitting time-signals. In consideration of the as- 

 sumption of responsibility and the efforts at introduction 

 made by the observatory, -the company would probably 

 be found willing to so adjust their charges that it would 

 prove to be entirely practicable for the various observa- 

 tories to secure a large patronage for the services 

 emanating from them without the financial burden seem- 

 ing an undue amount. — North Am. Rev. 



\Continued from page 270.] 



THE UNITY OF NATURE. 



By the Duke of Argyll. 



III. 



ANIMAL INSTINCT IN ITS RELATIONS TO THE MIND OF MAN. 



All the knowledge and all the resource of mind which 

 is involved in these instincts is a reflection of some Agency 

 which is outside the creatures which exhibit them. In this 

 respect it may be said with truth that they are machines. 

 But then they are machines with this peculiarity, that they 

 not only rerlect, but also in various measures and degrees 

 partake of, the attributes of mind. It is always by some one 

 or other of these attributes that they are guided — by fear, or 

 by desire, or by affection, or by mental impulses which go 

 straight to the results of reasoning without its processes. 

 That all these mental attributes are connected with a physi- 

 cal organism which is constructed on mechanical principles, 

 is not a matter of speculation. 1 1 is an obvious and acknowl- 

 edged fact. The question is not whether, in this sense, ani- 

 mals are machines, but whether the work which has been 

 assigned to them does or does not partake in various meas- 

 ures and degrees of the various qualities which we recog- 

 nize in ourselves as the qualities of sensation, of conscious- 

 ness and of will. 



On this matter it seems clear to me that Professor Huxley 

 has seriously misconceived the doctrine of Descartes. It is 

 true that he quotes a passage as representing the view of 

 "orthodox Cartesians," in which it is asserted that animals 

 "eat without ]>]e;isuie and cry without pain," and that they 

 " desire. " nothing as well as " know " nothing. Hut this pas 

 sage is quoted, not from Descartes, but from Malebranche. 

 Malebranche was a great man ; but on this subject he was the 

 disi i ] ile and not the master ; and it seems almost a law that no 

 utterance of original genius can long escape the fate of be- 

 ing travestied and turned to nonsense In those who take it 

 up at second hand. Descartes' letter to Moore, of the 5th 

 February, 1649, proves conclusively that he fully recog- 

 nized in the lower animals the existence of all the affections 

 of mind except " Thought "{la Pensie), or Reason, prop- 

 erly so railed, lie ascribes to them the mental emotions 

 ol tear, of anger, ami of desire, as well as all the sensations 

 ol pleasure and ot pain. What he means by thought is 

 clearly indicated in the passage in which he points to Lan- 



guage as the peculiar product and the sole index of Thought 

 — Language, of course, taken in its broadest sense, signi- 

 fying any system of signs bv which general or abstract 

 ideas are expressed and communicated. This, as Descartes 

 truly says, is never wanting, even in the lowest of men, and 

 is never present in the highest of the brutes. But he distinctly 

 says that the lower animals, having the same organs of sight, 

 of hearing, of taste, etc., with ourselves, have also the same 

 sensations, as well as the same affections of anger, of fear, 

 and of desire — affections which, being mental, he ascribes 

 to a lower kind or class of Soul, an " ame corporelle. ' 

 Descartes, therefore, was not guilty of confounding the two 

 elements of meaning which are involved in the word ma- 

 chine — that element which attaches to all machines made 

 by man as consisting of dead non-sentient matter — and 

 that other element of meaning which may be legitimately 

 attached to structures which have been made, not to sium- 

 late, but really to possess all the essential properties of 

 Life. " II faut pourtant remarquer," says Descartes, em- 

 phatically, " que je parle de la pensee non de la vie, ou de 

 sentiment." ' • 



The experiments quoted by Professor Huxley and by 

 other Physiologists, on the phenomena of vivisection, can- 

 not alter or modify the general conclusions which have 

 long been reached on the unquestionable connection be- 

 tween all the functions of Life and the mechanism of the 

 body. The question remains, whether the ascertainment 

 of this connection in its details can alter our conceptions 

 of what Life and sensation are. No light is thrown on 

 this question by cutting out from an organism certain parts 

 of the machinery which are known to be the seat of con- 

 sciousness, and then finding that the animal is still 

 capable of certain movements which are usually indicative 

 of sensation and of purpose. Surely the reasoning is 

 bad which argues that because a given movement goes on 

 after the animal has been mutilated, this movement 

 must therefore continue to possess all the same elements 

 of character which accompanied it when the animal was 

 complete. The character of purpose in one sense or 

 another belongs to all organic movements whatever — to those 

 which are independent of conscious sensation, or of the will, 

 as well as to those which are voluntary and intentional. 

 The only difference between the two classes of movement is, 

 that in the case of one of them the purpose is wholly outside 

 the animal, and that in the case of the other class of move- 

 ment the animal has faculties which make it, however indi- 

 rectly, a conscious participant or agent in the purpose, or in 

 some part of the purpose, to be subserved. The action of 

 the heart in animals is as certainly " purposive " in its char- 

 acter as the act of eating and deglutition. In the one the 

 animal is wholly passive — has no sensation, no conscious- 

 ness, however dim. In the other movement the animal is 

 an active agent, is impelled to it by desires which are men- 

 tal affections, and receives from it the appropriate pleasure 

 which belongs to consciousness and sensation. These 

 powers themselves, however, depend, each of them, on cer- 

 tain bits and parts of the animal mechanism ; and if these 

 parts can be separately injured or destroyed, it is intelligi- 

 ble enough that consciousness and sensation may be severed 

 for a time from the movements which they ordinarily accom- 

 pany and direct. The success of such an experiment may 

 teach us much on the details of a general truth which has 

 long been known — that conscious sensation is, so far as our 

 experience goes, inseparably dependent upon the mechan- 

 ism of an organic structure. But it cannot in the slightest 

 degree change or modify our conception of what conscious 

 sensation in itself is. It is mechanical exactly in the same 

 sense in which we have long known it to be so — that is to 

 say, it is the result of life working in and through a struc- 

 ture which has been made to exhibit and embody its peculiar 

 gifts and powers. 



Considering now that the body of man is one in 

 structure with the body of all vertebrate animals — con- 

 sidering that, as we rise from the lowest of these 

 to him who is the highest, we see this same struc- 

 ture elaborated into closer and closer likeness, until 

 every part corresponds, bone to bone, tissue to tissue, 

 organ to organ — I cannot doubt that Man is a machine, 

 precisely in the same sense in which animals are machines. 



1 " CEuvres de Descartes," Cousin, vol. x. p. 205 et 



*eg. 



