EDMUND MONTGOMERY—ARE WE CONSCIOUS AUTOMATA? 
79 
The firmest rock, towering in majestic grandeur, cleaves, falls and 
crumbles insentiently into scattering dust. But the frail body of man, 
by dint of those living bequeathments, victoriously resists the shatter¬ 
ing influences, gathering mindfully new strength in its clashing encoun¬ 
ters, and leaving its heightened existence in rejuvenated form to meet 
with new ardor the brunt of oncoming times. 
And here chimes in the true import of consciousness. Consciousness 
consists of the inner awareness by means of mental symbols of our own 
being, with its memorized faculties, and of the things and happenings of 
the world at large. Though its states are, as such, themselves forceless, 
and, therefore, incapable of being the cause of bodily motion, they com¬ 
pose our only source of information, through which we are guided in 
the execution of our voluntary movements. 
Whenever we are conscious, this our moment of present awareness 
forms a marvelously complex microcosm, into which come crowding, be¬ 
sides perceptual arousings from without and multifarious individual 
reminiscences, the immemorial memories of our race. All this resusci¬ 
tated, ghost-like assemblage of outer and inner experience falls into 
more or less systematic order, and is partly governable, for intentional 
purposes, by means of attentive focusing and fixation through linguistic 
contrivances. 
We find thus before us, at our immediate disposal, unchecked bv time 
and space-limitations, and rationalized by social usage and linguistic 
thought, the cumulated result of all ingathcred experience, emotional 
and perceptual. And as our executive organs, those, namely, which 
bring us into direct communion with the outside world, are subject to 
our volitional control, we become thus responsible for the practical use 
to which we put the vast deliberate information yielded by our micro- 
cosmic consciousness. 
Far, then, from being mere conscious automata, we are, if true to our 
evolutional mission, consciously-informed volitional agents in the reali¬ 
zation of human progress; nay, in the evolutional realization of the evolv¬ 
ing universe. 
Drawing with mystic roots our life-blood from the endless reach of 
time-withdrawn ages, we contemporaneous, sole-surviving scions of the 
perennial tree of life, are now here faithfully to uphold the painfully ac¬ 
quired worth of human existence, offering it in sympathetic interchange 
and gladsome sacrifice to the fructifying light of the progressive day. 
Is it not a sacred and exultant mission to he thus personally intrusted 
with the cumulated achievements of all bygone ages, to be constitution¬ 
ally representing the crowning embodiment of all secured results of life’s 
sore travail? 
Hallowed by the passing away into eternal silence of generation after 
