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 ariangements 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 commuted 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 estimate 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 ol 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 extent, 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. 
