1882.] 
Animal Automatism . 
191 
find that it is the very basis of medical science, and that 
every ordinary pradtitioner who has ever attended a dyspeptic 
or hypochondriacal patient knows that he can only minister 
to the mind by ministering to the body. If he were treating 
simply a phantasmal apparition, there could be no result, 
save in his own inner consciousness; but since his remedies 
do produce a result in the inner consciousness of his patient, 
it is clear that the physical frame upon which they have 
adted, so far from being unreal, is the only reality with which 
he is pradtically concerned. 
The effedts of the food which is daily transubstantiated by 
the incarnating digestive organs,* and the atrophy of mind 
and body which follow prolonged abstinence, prove alike the 
real existence of the material universe and its complete 
homogeneity with our own being. 
Prof. Huxley states that he is “ utterly incapable of con- 
ceiving the existence of matter, if there is no mind in which 
to picture that existence.” Here, as elsewhere, he confounds 
material phenomena, which cannot exist without a percipient 
mind, with matter itself. Unless his views have recently 
undergone a marvellous change, he holds that the earth was 
in being very long before the appearance of any sentient 
organism. Will he now maintain that this seonial existence 
depended upon a pidlure formed in some mind, Supreme or 
otherwise ? In his work on “ Man’s Place in Nature ” he 
expressly asserts his convidtion that mind is developed from 
matter, and that “even the highest faculties of feeling and 
of intelledt begin to germinate in lower forms of life.” Ac- 
cording to his present theory, nothing whatever could have 
existed previously to this germination — not mind, since it 
was as yet unborn ; not matter, since there was no mind in 
which it could be pidfured. In fadl there could have been no 
“ lower forms of life,” and therefore no germination ! 
The existence of matter may now be regarded as a theo- 
retical and pradtical necessity, and the only question which 
remains is this — Can a separable spiritual essence be consi- 
dered absolutely superfluous, or must the “dead matter” of 
the universe be inspired with energy from some external 
source before it can fashion itself into living and sentient 
organisms ? Let us turn for information to Prof. Huxley 
himself. “ If,” he says, “ there is any truth in the received 
dodtrines of physics, that contrast between living and inert 
# Digestion (concodtion), a pre-scientific — indeed anti-scientific — term, is, 
in corredt phraseology, now superseded by the term assimilation, i.e., the pro- 
cess of asselfing, or incorporating with Self objedts of Not Self, thus indicating 
the essential consubstantiality of subjedt and objedt.— R. L. 
