“Professor Huxley,” says Mr. Romanes, in his Rede Lecture for 1885, { 140a} “argues by way of perfectly logical deduction from this statement, that thought and feeling have nothing to do with determining action; they are merely the bye-products of cerebration, or, as he expresses it, the indices of changes which are going on in the brain. Under this view we are all what he terms conscious automata, or machines which happen, as it were by chance, to be conscious of some of their own movements. But the consciousness is altogether adventitious, and bears the same ineffectual relation to the activity of the brain as a steam whistle bears to the activity of a locomotive, or the striking of a clock to the time-keeping adjustments of the clockwork. Here, again, we meet with an echo of Hobbes, who opens his work on the commonwealth with these words:—
“‘Nature, the art whereby God hath made and governs the world, is by the _art_ of man, as in many other things, in this also imitated, that it can make an artificial animal. For seeing life is but a motion of limbs, the beginning whereof is in the principal part within; why may we not say that all automata (engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life? For what is the _heart_ but a spring, and the _nerves_ but so many _strings_; and the _joints_ but so many _wheels_ giving motion to the whole body, such as was intended by the artificer?’
“Now this theory of conscious automatism is not merely a legitimate outcome of the theory that nervous changes are the causes of mental changes, but it is logically the only possible outcome. Nor do I see any way in which this theory can be fought on grounds of physiology.”
In passing, I may say the theory that living beings are conscious machines, can be fought just as much and just as little as the theory that machines are unconscious living beings; everything that goes to prove either of these propositions goes just as well to prove the other also. But I have perhaps already said as much as is necessary on this head; the main point with which I am concerned is the fact that Professor Huxley was trying to expel consciousness and sentience from any causative action in the working of the universe. In the following month appeared the late Professor Clifford’s hardly less outspoken article, “Body and Mind,” to the same effect, also in the _Fortnightly Review_, then edited by Mr. John Morley. Perhaps this view attained its frankest expression in an article by the late Mr. Spalding, which appeared in _Nature_, August 2, 1877; the following extracts will show that Mr. Spalding must be credited with not playing fast and loose with his own conclusions, and knew both how to think a thing out to its extreme consequences, and how to put those consequences clearly before his readers. Mr. Spalding said:—