SCIENCE. 



281 



If it is no contradiction in terms to speak of a machine 

 which has been made to feel and to see, and to hear and 

 to desire, neither need there be any contradiction in terms 

 in speaking of a machine which has been made to think, 

 and to reflect, and to reason. These are, indeed, powers 

 so much higher than the others that they may be consid- 

 ered as different in kind. But this difference, however 

 great it mav be, whether we look at it in its practical re- 

 sults, or as a question of classification, is certainly not a 

 difference which throws any doubt upon the fact that all 

 these higher powers are, equally with the lowest, depend- 

 ent in this world on special arrangements in a material 

 organism. It seems to me that the very fact of the ques- 

 tion being raised whether Man can be called a machine in 

 the same sense as that in which alone the lower animals can 

 properly be so described, is a proof that the questioner be- 

 lieves the lower animals to be machines in a sense in which 

 it is not true. Such manifestations of mental attributes as 

 they display are the true and veritable index of powers 

 which are really by them possessed and enjoyed. The 

 notion that, because these powers depend on an organic 

 apparatus, they are therefore not what they seem to be, is a 

 mere confusion of thought. On the other hand, when this 

 comes to be thoroughly understood, the notion that Man's 

 peculiar powers are lowered and dishonored when they are 

 conceived to stand in any similar relation to the body must 

 be equally abandoned, as partaking of the same fallacy. 

 If the sensation of pleasure and of pain, and the more purely 

 mental manifestations of fear and of affection have in the 

 lower animals some inseparable connection with an organic 

 apparatus, I do not see why we should be jealous of admit- 

 ting that the still higher powers of self-consciousness and 

 reason have in Man a similar connection with the same kind 

 of mechanism. The nature of this connection in itself is 

 equally mysterious, and, indeed, inconceivable in either case. 

 As a matter of fact, we have precisely the same evidence 

 as to both. If painful and pleasurable emotions can be de- 

 stroyed by the cutting of a nerve, so also can the powers of 

 memory and of reason be destroyed by any injury or disease 

 which affects some bits of the substance of the brain. If, 

 however, the fact of this mysterious connection be so in- 

 terpreted as to make us alter our conceptions of what self- 

 consciousness, and reason, and all mental manifestations 

 in themselves are, then indeed we man well be jealous — 

 not of the facts, but of the illogical use which is often made 

 of them. Self-consciousness and reason and affection, and 

 fear and pain and pleasure, are in themselves exactly what 

 we have always known them to be ; and no discovery as to 

 the physical apparatus with which they are somehow con- 

 nected can throw the smallest obscurity on the criteria by 

 which they are to be identified as so many different phe- 

 nomena of mind. Our old knowledge of the work done is 

 in no way altered by any new information as to the appara- 

 tus by which it is effected. This is the error commttted by 

 those who think they can found a new Psychology on the 

 knife. They seem to think that sensation and memory, 

 and reasoning and will, become something different from 

 that which thiterto we have known them to be, when we 

 have found out that each of these powers may have some 

 special " seat" or " organ" in the body. This, however, is 

 a pure delusion. The known element in psychology is 

 always the nature of the mental faculty; the unknown ele- 

 ment is always the nature of its connection with any organ. 

 We know the operations of our own minds with a fullness and 

 realty which does not belong to any other knowledge what- 

 ever. We do not know the bond of union between these 

 operations and the brain, except as a sort of external and 

 wholly unintelligible fact. Remembering all this, then, we 

 need not fear or shrink from the admission that Man is a 

 reasoning and self-conscious machine, just in the same 

 sense in which the lower animals are machines which have 

 been made to exhibit and possess certain mental faculties 

 of a lower class. 



But what of this ? What is the value of this conclusion ? 

 Its value would be small indeed if this conception of our- 

 selves as machines could be defended only as a harmless 

 metaphor. But there is far more to be said for it and 

 about it than this. The conception is one which is not 

 only harmless, but profoundly true, as all metaphors are 

 when they are securely rooted in the Homologies of 



Nature. There is much to be learnt from that aspect of 

 mind in which we regard its powers as intimately 

 connected with a material apparatus, and from that as- 

 pect of our own bodies in which they are regarded as 

 one in structure with the bodies of the brutes. Surely it 

 would be a strange object of ambition to try to think that 

 we are not included in the vast system of adjustment which 

 we have thus traced in them ; that our nobler faculties have 

 no share in the secure and wonderful guarantee which it 

 affords for the truthfulness of all mental gifts. It is well 

 that we should place a high esrimate on the superiority of 

 the powers which we possess ; and that the distinction, with 

 all its consequences, between self-conscious Reason and the 

 comparatively simple perceptions of the beasts, should be 

 ever kept in view. But it is not well that we should omit 

 from that estimate a common element of immense impor- 

 tance which belongs to both, and the value of which becomes 

 immeasurably greater in its connection with our special gifts. 

 That element is the element of adjustment — the element 

 which suggests the idea of an apparatus — the element which 

 constitutes all our higher faculties the index and the result 

 of a pre-adjustment harmony. In the light of this conception 

 we can see a new meaning in our " place in Nature ; " that 

 place which, so far as our bodily organs are concerned, as- 

 signs to us simply a front rank among the creatures which 

 are endowed with Life. It is in virtue of that place and as- 

 sociation that we may be best assured that our special gifts 

 have the same relation to the higher realities of Nature which 

 the lower faculties of the beasts have to the lower realities 

 of tne physical world. Whatever we have that is peculiar to 

 ourselves is built up on the same firm foundation on which 

 all animal instincts rests. It is often said that we can never 

 really know what unreasoning instinct is, because we can 

 never enter into an animal mind, and see what is working 

 there. Men are so apt to be arrogant in philosophy that it 

 seems almost wrong to deprecate even any semblance of the 

 consciousness of ignorance. But it were much to be desired 

 that the modesty of philosophers would come in the right 

 places. I hold that we can know.and can almost thoroughly 

 understand, the instincts of the lower animals ; and this for 

 the best of all reasons, that we are ourselves animals, what- 

 ever more ; — having, to a large exient, precisely the same in- 

 stincts, with the additional power of looking down upon our- 

 selves in this capacity from a higher elevation to which we 

 can ascend at will. Not only are our bodily functions pre- 

 cisely similar to those of the lower animals, — some, like the 

 beating of the heart, being purely "automatic " or involun- 

 tary — others being partially, and others again being wholly, 

 under the control of the will — but many of our sensations 

 and emotions are obviously the same with the sensations 

 and emotions of the lower animals, connected with precisely 

 the same machinery, presenting precisely the same phenom- 

 ena, and recognizable by all the same criteria. 



It is true that many of our actions became instinctive and 

 mechanical only as the result of a previous intellectual op- 

 eration of the self-conscious or reasoning kind. And this, 

 no doubt, is the origin of the dream that all instinct, even 

 in the animals, has had the same origin ; a dream due to 

 the exaggerated "anthropomorphism" of those very phi- 

 losophers who are most apt to denounce this source of error 

 in others. But man has many instincts like the animals, to 

 which no such origin in personal experience or in previous 

 reasoning can be assigned. For not only in earliest infancy, 

 but throughout life, we do innumerable things to which we 

 are led by purely organic impulse ; things which have in- 

 deed a reason and a use, but a reason which we never know, 

 and a use which we never discern, till we come to "think." 

 And how different this process of "thinking" is we 

 know likewise from our own experience. In con- 

 templating the phenomena of reasoning and of conscious 

 deliberation, it really seems as if it were impossible 

 to sever it from the idea of a double personality 

 Tennyson's poem of the "Two Voices" is no poetic 

 exaggeration of the duality of which we are conscious 

 when we attend to the mental operations of our own 

 most complex nature. It is as if there were within us one 

 Being always receptive of suggestions, and always respond- 

 ing in the form of impulse — and another being capable of 

 passing these suggestions in review before it, and of allow- 

 ing or disallowing the impulses to which they give rise. 



