EUMUND MONTGOMERY—ARE WE CONSCIOUS AUTOMATA? 
67 
pend on the absolute validity of the doctrine that everything happening 
in the material universe is in all verity the result of atomic mechanics. 
This abstruse mechanical and necessitarian doctrine, so strangely at 
variance with what our individual feelings and intuitions seem to 
teach, has, nevertheless, come to he the canon adopted by modern sci¬ 
ence, for guidance in its marvelously successful investigation and techni¬ 
cal use of natural phenomena. 
Descartes already maintained, and so also Gassendi, that “all varia¬ 
tion of matter, or all diversity of its forms, depends on motion.” 
Hobbes reduced, likewise, all natural occurrences to modes of motion. 
And it can not he denied that the so-called laws of motion, experiential- 
ly ascertained and mathematically formulated by Galileo, Huygens, 
Newton, and iheir followers, when applied to natural phenomena, have, 
by furnishing us with definitely verifiable knowledge, proved them¬ 
selves most efficient deliverers from the phantasmagorieal superstitions 
of the dark ages. 
It is undeniably clear that all perceptible changes in nature are modes 
of motion of that which is seen moving. Consequently, the general laws 
governing the motions being ascertained, they need only he applied to 
special cases in order to scientifically determine them. And this, in 
fact, is what atomic mechanics is seeking to accomplish. It assumes that 
what we see moving are material particles, and that these move in rigor¬ 
ous keeping with mechanical laws. 
This view in mind, Newton and Boyle looked upon all changes in the 
material universe as mechanically effected. Leibnitz declared, likewise, 
that “everything in nature is effected mechanically,” and “that a body 
is never moved naturally, except by another body, which presses in 
touching it.” Huygens expresses himself to the same effect by asserting 
that “in true philosophy the causes of all natural effects are to be con¬ 
ceived mechanically.” And, coming down again to our own time, Helm¬ 
holtz tells us that “the object, of the natural sciences is to resolve them¬ 
selves into mechanics.” Kirchhoff, the discoverer with Bunsen of spec¬ 
trum analysis, reiterates the same scientific conviction when he says: 
“The highest object at which the natural sciences are constrained to aim 
is the reduction .of all phenomena of nature to mechanics.” In the same 
strain other physicists and biologists, and among them most emphatical¬ 
ly Haeckel and Wundt. In fact, it has been the strenuous effort, not only 
of physics, but also of chemistry and physiology, to seek an explanation 
of their respective phenomena by expressing them in terms of atomic 
mechanics, or simply in time and space determinations of that which is 
moving. 
All this, no doubt, sounds like rank materialism, and is as such ab¬ 
horrent to the pious ears of our present sectarians. It would be a great 
