Luck, or Cunning, as the Main Means of Organic Modification Part 7

Science is, like love, "too young to know what conscience," or common sense, is. As soon as the world began to busy itself with evolution it said good-bye to common sense, and must get on with uncommon sense as best it can. The first lesson that uncommon sense will teach it is that contradiction in terms is the foundation of all sound reasoning--and, as an obvious consequence, compromise, the foundation of all sound practice. This, it follows easily, involves the corollary that as faith, to be of any value, must be based on reason, so reason, to be of any value, must be based on faith, and that neither can stand alone or dispense with the other, any more than culture or vulgarity can stand unalloyed with one another without much danger of mischance.

It may not perhaps be immediately apparent why the admission that a piece of healthy living brain is more living than the end of a finger-nail, is so dangerous to common sense ways of looking at life and death; I had better, therefore, be more explicit. By this admission degrees of livingness are admitted within the body; this involves approaches to non-livingness. On this the question arises, "Which are the most living parts?" The answer to this was given a few years ago with a flourish of trumpets, and our biologists shouted with one voice, "Great is protoplasm. There is no life but protoplasm, and Huxley is its prophet." Read Huxley's "Physical Basis of Mind." Read Professor Mivart's article, "What are Living Beings?" in the Contemporary Review, July, 1879. Read Dr. Andrew Wilson's article in the Gentleman's Magazine, October, 1879.

Remember Professor Allman's address to the British a.s.sociation, 1879; ask, again, any medical man what is the most approved scientific att.i.tude as regards the protoplasmic and non-protoplasmic parts of the body, and he will say that the thinly veiled conclusion arrived at by all of them is, that the protoplasmic parts are alone truly living, and that the non-protoplasmic are non-living.

It may suffice if I confine myself to Professor Allman's address to the British a.s.sociation in 1879, as a representative utterance.

Professor Allman said:-

"Protoplasm lies at the base of every vital phenomenon. It is, as Huxley has well expressed it, 'the physical basis of life;' wherever there is life from its lowest to its highest manifestation there is protoplasm; wherever there is protoplasm there is life." {122a}

To say wherever there is life there is protoplasm, is to say that there can be no life without protoplasm, and this is saying that where there is no protoplasm there is no life. But large parts of the body are non-protoplasmic; a bone is, indeed, permeated by protoplasm, but it is not protoplasm; it follows, therefore, that according to Professor Allman bone is not in any proper sense of words a living substance. From this it should follow, and doubtless does follow in Professor Allman's mind, that large tracts of the human body, if not the greater part by weight (as bones, skin, muscular tissues, &c.), are no more alive than a coat or pair of boots in wear is alive, except in so far as the bones, &c., are more closely and nakedly permeated by protoplasm than the coat or boots, and are thus brought into closer, directer, and more permanent communication with that which, if not life itself, still has more of the ear of life, and comes nearer to its royal person than anything else does. Indeed that this is Professor Allman's opinion appears from the pa.s.sage on page 26 of the report, in which he says that in "protoplasm we find the only form of matter in which life can manifest itself."

According to this view the skin and other tissues are supposed to be made from dead protoplasm which living protoplasm turns to account as the British Museum authorities are believed to stuff their new specimens with the skins of old ones; the matter used by the living protoplasm for this purpose is held to be entirely foreign to protoplasm itself, and no more capable of acting in concert with it than bricks can understand and act in concert with the bricklayer.

As the bricklayer is held to be living and the bricks non-living, so the bones and skin which protoplasm is supposed to construct are held non-living and the protoplasm alone living. Protoplasm, it is said, goes about masked behind the clothes or habits which it has fas.h.i.+oned. It has habited itself as animals and plants, and we have mistaken the garment for the wearer--as our dogs and cats doubtless think with Giordano Bruno that our boots live when we are wearing them, and that we keep spare paws in our bedrooms which lie by the wall and go to sleep when we have not got them on.

If, in answer to the a.s.sertion that the osseous parts of bone are non-living, it is said that they must be living, for they heal if broken, which no dead matter can do, it is answered that the broken pieces of bone do not grow together; they are mended by the protoplasm which permeates the Haversian ca.n.a.ls; the bones themselves are no more living merely because they are tenanted by something which really does live, than a house lives because men and women inhabit it; and if a bone is repaired, it no more repairs itself than a house can be said to have repaired itself because its owner has sent for the bricklayer and seen that what was wanted was done.

We do not know, it is said, by what means the structureless viscid substance which we call protoplasm can build for itself a solid bone; we do not understand how an amoeba makes its test; no one understands how anything is done unless he can do it himself; and even then he probably does not know how he has done it. Set a man who has never painted, to watch Rembrandt paint the Burgomaster Six, and he will no more understand how Rembrandt can have done it, than we can understand how the amoeba makes its test, or the protoplasm cements two broken ends of a piece of bone. Ces choses se font mais ne s'expliquent pas. So some denizen of another planet looking at our earth through a telescope which showed him much, but still not quite enough, and seeing the St. Gothard tunnel plumb on end so that he could not see the holes of entry and exit, would think the trains there a kind of caterpillar which went through the mountain by a pure effort of the will--that enabled them in some mysterious way to disregard material obstacles and dispense with material means. We know, of course, that it is not so, and that exemption from the toil attendant on material obstacles has been compounded for, in the ordinary way, by the single payment of a tunnel; and so with the cementing of a bone, our biologists say that the protoplasm, which is alone living, cements it much as a man might mend a piece of broken china, but that it works by methods and processes which elude us, even as the holes of the St. Gothard tunnel may be supposed to elude a denizen of another world.

The reader will already have seen that the toils are beginning to close round those who, while professing to be guided by common sense, still parley with even the most superficial probers beneath the surface; this, however, will appear more clearly in the following chapter. It will also appear how far-reaching were the consequences of the denial of design that was involved in Mr.

Darwin's theory that luck is the main element in survival, and how largely this theory is responsible for the fatuous developments in connection alike with protoplasm and automatism which a few years ago seemed about to carry everything before them.

CHAPTER IX--Property, Common Sense, and Protoplasm (continued)

The position, then, stands thus. Common sense gave the inch of admitting some parts of the body to be less living than others, and philosophy took the ell of declaring the body to be almost all of it stone dead. This is serious; still if it were all, for a quiet life, we might put up with it. Unfortunately we know only too well that it will not be all. Our bodies, which seemed so living and now prove so dead, have served us such a trick that we can have no confidence in anything connected with them. As with skin and bones to-day, so with protoplasm to-morrow. Protoplasm is mainly oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon; if we do not keep a sharp look out, we shall have it going the way of the rest of the body, and being declared dead in respect, at any rate, of these inorganic components. Science has not, I believe, settled all the components of protoplasm, but this is neither here nor there; she has settled what it is in great part, and there is no trusting her not to settle the rest at any moment, even if she has not already done so. As soon as this has been done we shall be told that nine-tenths of the protoplasm of which we are composed must go the way of our non- protoplasmic parts, and that the only really living part of us is the something with a new name that runs the protoplasm that runs the flesh and bones that run the organs -

Why stop here? Why not add "which run the tools and properties which are as essential to our life and health as much that is actually incorporate with us?" The same breach which has let the non-living effect a lodgment within the body must, in all equity, let the organic character--bodiliness, so to speak--pa.s.s out beyond its limits and effect a lodgment in our temporary and extra- corporeal limbs. What, on the protoplasmic theory, the skin and bones are, that the hammer and spade are also; they differ in the degree of closeness and permanence with which they are a.s.sociated with protoplasm, but both bones and hammers are alike non-living things which protoplasm uses for its own purposes and keeps closer or less close at hand as custom and convenience may determine.

According to this view, the non-protoplasmic parts of the body are tools of the first degree; they are not living, but they are in such close and constant contact with that which really lives, that an aroma of life attaches to them. Some of these, however, such as horns, hooves, and tusks, are so little permeated by protoplasm that they cannot rank much higher than the tools of the second degree, which come next to them in order.

These tools of the second degree are either picked up ready-made, or are manufactured directly by the body, as being torn or bitten into shape, or as stones picked up to throw at prey or at an enemy.

Tools of the third degree are made by the instrumentality of tools of the second and first degrees; as, for example, chipped flint, arrow-heads, &c.

Tools of the fourth degree are made by those of the third, second, and first. They consist of the simpler compound instruments that yet require to be worked by hand, as hammers, spades, and even hand flour-mills.

Tools of the fifth degree are made by the help of those of the fourth, third, second, and first. They are compounded of many tools, worked, it may be, by steam or water and requiring no constant contact with the body.

But each one of these tools of the fifth degree was made in the first instance by the sole instrumentality of the four preceding kinds of tool. They must all be linked on to protoplasm, which is the one original tool-maker, but which can only make the tools that are more remote from itself by the help of those that are nearer, that is to say, it can only work when it has suitable tools to work with, and when it is allowed to use them in its own way. There can be no direct communication between protoplasm and a steam-engine; there may be and often is direct communication between machines of even the fifth order and those of the first, as when an engine-man turns a c.o.c.k, or repairs something with his own hands if he has nothing better to work with. But put a hammer, for example, to a piece of protoplasm, and the protoplasm will no more know what to do with it than we should be able to saw a piece of wood in two without a saw. Even protoplasm from the hand of a carpenter who has been handling hammers all his life would be hopelessly put off its stroke if not allowed to work in its usual way but put bare up against a hammer; it would make a slimy mess and then dry up; still there can be no doubt (so at least those who uphold protoplasm as the one living substance would say) that the closer a machine can be got to protoplasm and the more permanent the connection, the more living it appears to be, or at any rate the more does it appear to be endowed with spontaneous and reasoning energy, so long, of course, as the closeness is of a kind which protoplasm understands and is familiar with. This, they say, is why we do not like using any implement or tool with gloves on, for these impose a barrier between the tool and its true connection with protoplasm by means of the nervous system.

For the same reason we put gloves on when we box so as to bar the connection.

That which we handle most unglovedly is our food, which we handle with our stomachs rather than with our hands. Our hands are so thickly encased with skin that protoplasm can hold but small conversation with what they contain, unless it be held for a long time in the closed fist, and even so the converse is impeded as in a strange language; the inside of our mouths is more naked, and our stomachs are more naked still; it is here that protoplasm brings its fullest powers of suasion to bear on those whom it would proselytise and receive as it were into its own communion--whom it would convert and bring into a condition of mind in which they shall see things as it sees them itself, and, as we commonly say, "agree with" it, instead of standing out stiffly for their own opinion. We call this digesting our food; more properly we should call it being digested by our food, which reads, marks, learns, and inwardly digests us, till it comes to understand us and encourage us by a.s.suring us that we were perfectly right all the time, no matter what any one might have said, or say, to the contrary. Having thus recanted all its own past heresies, it sets to work to convert everything that comes near it and seems in the least likely to be converted. Eating is a mode of love; it is an effort after a closer union; so we say we love roast beef. A French lady told me once that she adored veal; and a nurse tells her child that she would like to eat it. Even he who caresses a dog or horse pro tanto both weds and eats it.

Strange how close the a.n.a.logy between love and hunger; in each case the effort is after closer union and possession; in each case the outcome is reproduction (for nutrition is the most complete of reproductions), and in each case there are residua. But to return.

I have shown above that one consequence of the attempt so vigorously made a few years ago to establish protoplasm as the one living substance, is the making it clear that the non-protoplasmic parts of the body and the simpler extra-corporeal tools or organs must run on all fours in the matter of livingness and non-livingness. If the protoplasmic parts of the body are held living in virtue of their being used by something that really lives, then so, though in a less degree, must tools and machines. If, on the other hand, tools and machines are held non-living inasmuch as they only owe what little appearance of life they may present when in actual use to something else that lives, and have no life of their own--so, though in a less degree, must the non-protoplasmic parts of the body. Allow an overflowing aroma of life to vivify the h.o.r.n.y skin under the heel, and from this there will be a spilling which will vivify the boot in wear. Deny an aroma of life to the boot in wear, and it must ere long be denied to ninety-nine per cent. of the body; and if the body is not alive while it can walk and talk, what in the name of all that is unreasonable can be held to be so?

That the essential ident.i.ty of bodily organs and tools is no ingenious paradoxical way of putting things is evident from the fact that we speak of bodily organs at all. Organ means tool. There is nothing which reveals our most genuine opinions to us so unerringly as our habitual and unguarded expressions, and in the case under consideration so completely do we instinctively recognise the underlying ident.i.ty of tools and limbs, that scientific men use the word "organ" for any part of the body that discharges a function, practically to the exclusion of any other term. Of course, however, the above contention as to the essential ident.i.ty of tools and organs does not involve a denial of their obvious superficial differences--differences so many and so great as to justify our cla.s.sing them in distinct categories so long as we have regard to the daily purposes of life without looking at remoter ones.

If the above be admitted, we can reply to those who in an earlier chapter objected to our saying that if Mr. Darwin denied design in the eye he should deny it in the burglar's jemmy also. For if bodily and non-bodily organs are essentially one in kind, being each of them both living and non-living, and each of them only a higher development of principles already admitted and largely acted on in the other, then the method of procedure observable in the evolution of the organs whose history is within our ken should throw light upon the evolution of that whose history goes back into so dim a past that we can only know it by way of inference. In the absence of any show of reason to the contrary we should argue from the known to the unknown, and presume that even as our non-bodily organs originated and were developed through gradual acc.u.mulation of design, effort, and contrivance guided by experience, so also must our bodily organs have been, in spite of the fact that the contrivance has been, as it were, denuded of external evidences in the course of long time. This at least is the most obvious inference to draw; the burden of proof should rest not with those who uphold function as the most important means of organic modification, but with those who impugn it; it is hardly necessary, however, to say that Mr. Darwin never attempted to impugn by way of argument the conclusions either of his grandfather or of Lamarck.

He waved them both aside in one or two short semi-contemptuous sentences, and said no more about them--not, at least, until late in life he wrote his "Erasmus Darwin," and even then his remarks were purely biographical; he did not say one syllable by way of refutation, or even of explanation.

I am free to confess that, overwhelming as is the evidence brought forward by Mr. Spencer in the articles already referred to, as showing that accidental variations, unguided by the helm of any main general principle which should as it were keep their heads straight, could never acc.u.mulate with the results supposed by Mr. Darwin; and overwhelming, again, as is the consideration that Mr. Spencer's most crus.h.i.+ng argument was allowed by Mr. Darwin to go without reply, still the considerations arising from the discoveries of the last forty years or so in connection with protoplasm, seem to me almost more overwhelming still. This evidence proceeds on different lines from that adduced by Mr. Spencer, but it points to the same conclusion, namely, that though luck will avail much if backed by cunning and experience, it is unavailing for any permanent result without them. There is an irony which seems almost always to attend on those who maintain that protoplasm is the only living substance which ere long points their conclusions the opposite way to that which they desire--in the very last direction, indeed, in which they of all people in the world would willingly see them pointed.

It may be asked why I should have so strong an objection to seeing protoplasm as the only living substance, when I find this view so useful to me as tending to substantiate design--which I admit that I have as much and as seriously at heart as I can allow myself to have any matter which, after all, can so little affect daily conduct; I reply that it is no part of my business to inquire whether this or that makes for my pet theories or against them; my concern is to inquire whether or no it is borne out by facts, and I find the opinion that protoplasm is the one living substance unstable, inasmuch as it is an attempt to make a halt where no halt can be made. This is enough; but, furthermore, the fact that the protoplasmic parts of the body are MORE living than the non- protoplasmic--which I cannot deny, without denying that it is any longer convenient to think of life and death at all--will answer my purpose to the full as well or better.

I pointed out another consequence, which, again, was cruelly the reverse of what the promoters of the protoplasm movement might be supposed anxious to arrive at--in a series of articles which appeared in the Examiner during the summer of 1879, and showed that if protoplasm were held to be the sole seat of life, then this unity in the substance vivifying all, both animals and plants, must be held as uniting them into a single corporation or body--especially when their community of descent is borne in mind--more effectually than any merely superficial separation into individuals can be held to disunite them, and that thus protoplasm must be seen as the life of the world--as a vast body corporate, never dying till the earth itself shall pa.s.s away. This came practically to saying that protoplasm was G.o.d Almighty, who, of all the forms open to Him, had chosen this singularly unattractive one as the channel through which to make Himself manifest in the flesh by taking our nature upon Him, and animating us with His own Spirit. Our biologists, in fact, were fast nearing the conception of a G.o.d who was both personal and material, but who could not be made to square with pantheistic notions inasmuch as no provision was made for the inorganic world; and, indeed, they seem to have become alarmed at the grotesqueness of the position in which they must ere long have found themselves, for in the autumn of 1879 the boom collapsed, and thenceforth the leading reviews and magazines have known protoplasm no more. About the same time bathybius, which at one time bade fair to supplant it upon the throne of popularity, died suddenly, as I am told, at Norwich, under circ.u.mstances which did not transpire, nor has its name, so far as I am aware, been ever again mentioned.

So much for the conclusions in regard to the larger aspect of life taken as a whole which must follow from confining life to protoplasm; but there is another aspect--that, namely, which regards the individual. The inevitable consequences of confining life to the protoplasmic parts of the body were just as unexpected and unwelcome here as they had been with regard to life at large; for, as I have already pointed out, there is no drawing the line at protoplasm and resting at this point; nor yet at the next halting- point beyond; nor at the one beyond that. How often is this process to be repeated? and in what can it end but in the rehabilitation of the soul as an ethereal, spiritual, vital principle, apart from matter, which, nevertheless, it animates, vivifying the clay of our bodies? No one who has followed the course either of biology or psychology during this century, and more especially during the last five-and-twenty years, will tolerate the reintroduction of the soul as something apart from the substratum in which both feeling and action must be held to inhere. The notion of matter being ever changed except by other matter in another state is so shocking to the intellectual conscience that it may be dismissed without discussion; yet if bathybius had not been promptly dealt with, it must have become apparent even to the British public that there were indeed but few steps from protoplasm, as the only living substance, to vital principle. Our biologists therefore stifled bathybius, perhaps with justice, certainly with prudence, and left protoplasm to its fate.

Any one who reads Professor Allman's address above referred to with due care will see that he was uneasy about protoplasm, even at the time of its greatest popularity. Professor Allman never says outright that the non-protoplasmic parts of the body are no more alive than chairs and tables are. He said what involved this as an inevitable consequence, and there can be no doubt that this is what he wanted to convey, but he never insisted on it with the outspokenness and emphasis with which so startling a paradox should alone be offered us for acceptance; nor is it easy to believe that his reluctance to express his conclusion totidem verbis was not due to a sense that it might ere long prove more convenient not to have done so. When I advocated the theory of the livingness, or quasi- livingness of machines, in the chapters of "Erewhon" of which all else that I have written on biological subjects is a development, I took care that people should see the position in its extreme form; the non-livingness of bodily organs is to the full as startling a paradox as the livingness of non-bodily ones, and we have a right to expect the fullest explicitness from those who advance it. Of course it must be borne in mind that a machine can only claim any appreciable even aroma of livingness so long as it is in actual use.

In "Erewhon" I did not think it necessary to insist on this, and did not, indeed, yet fully know what I was driving at.

The same disposition to avoid committing themselves to the a.s.sertion that any part of the body is non-living may be observed in the writings of the other authorities upon protoplasm above referred to; I have searched all they said, and cannot find a single pa.s.sage in which they declare even the osseous parts of a bone to be non- living, though this conclusion was the raison d'etre of all they were saying and followed as an obvious inference. The reader will probably agree with me in thinking that such reticence can only have been due to a feeling that the ground was one on which it behoved them to walk circ.u.mspectly; they probably felt, after a vague, ill- defined fas.h.i.+on, that the more they reduced the body to mechanism the more they laid it open to an opponent to raise mechanism to the body, but, however this may be, they dropped protoplasm, as I have said, in some haste with the autumn of 1879.

CHAPTER X--The Attempt to Eliminate Mind

What, it may be asked, were our biologists really aiming at?--for men like Professor Huxley do not serve protoplasm for nought. They wanted a good many things, some of them more righteous than others, but all intelligible. Among the more lawful of their desires was a craving after a monistic conception of the universe. We all desire this; who can turn his thoughts to these matters at all and not instinctively lean towards the old conception of one supreme and ultimate essence as the source from which all things proceed and have proceeded, both now and ever? The most striking and apparently most stable theory of the last quarter of a century had been Sir William Grove's theory of the conservation of energy; and yet wherein is there any substantial difference between this recent outcome of modern amateur, and hence most sincere, science--pointing as it does to an imperishable, and as such unchangeable, and as such, again, for ever unknowable underlying substance the modes of which alone change--wherein, except in mere verbal costume, does this differ from the conclusions arrived at by the psalmist?

"Of old," he exclaims, "hast Thou laid the foundation of the earth; and the heavens are the work of Thy hands. They shall perish, but Thou shalt endure; yea, all of them shall wax old like a garment; as a vesture shalt Thou change them and they shall be changed; but Thou art the same, and Thy years shall have no end." {135a}

I know not what theologians may think of this pa.s.sage, but from a scientific point of view it is una.s.sailable. So again, "O Lord," he exclaims, "Thou hast searched me out, and known me: Thou knowest my down-sitting and mine up-rising; Thou understandest my thoughts long before. Thou art about my path, and about my bed: and spiest out all my ways. For lo, there is not a word in my tongue but Thou, O Lord, knowest it altogether . . . Whither shall I go, then, from Thy Spirit? Or whither shall I go, then, from Thy presence? If I climb up into heaven Thou art there: if I go down to h.e.l.l, Thou art there also. If I take the wings of the morning, and remain in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there also shall Thy hand lead me and Thy right hand shall hold me. If I say, Peradventure the darkness shall cover me, then shall my night be turned to day. Yea, the darkness is no darkness with Thee, but . . . the darkness and light to Thee are both alike." {136a}

What convention or short cut can symbolise for us the results of laboured and complicated chains of reasoning or bring them more aptly and concisely home to us than the one supplied long since by the word G.o.d? What can approach more nearly to a rendering of that which cannot be rendered--the idea of an essence omnipresent in all things at all times everywhere in sky and earth and sea; ever changing, yet the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever; the ineffable contradiction in terms whose presence none can either ever enter, or ever escape? Or rather, what convention would have been more apt if it had not been lost sight of as a convention and come to be regarded as an idea in actual correspondence with a more or less knowable reality? A convention was converted into a fetish, and now that its worthlessness as a fetish is being generally felt, its great value as a hieroglyph or convention is in danger of being lost sight of. No doubt the psalmist was seeking for Sir William Grove's conception, if haply he might feel after it and find it, and a.s.suredly it is not far from every one of us. But the course of true philosophy never did run smooth; no sooner have we fairly grasped the conception of a single eternal and for ever unknowable underlying substance, then we are faced by mind and matter. Long- standing ideas and current language alike lead us to see these as distinct things--mind being still commonly regarded as something that acts on body from without as the wind blows upon a leaf, and as no less an actual ent.i.ty than the body. Neither body nor mind seems less essential to our existence than the other; not only do we feel this as regards our own existence, but we feel it also as pervading the whole world of life; everywhere we see body and mind working together towards results that must be ascribed equally to both; but they are two, not one; if, then, we are to have our monistic conception, it would seem as though one of these must yield to the other; which, therefore, is it to be?

This is a very old question. Some, from time immemorial, have tried to get rid of matter by reducing it to a mere concept of the mind, and their followers have arrived at conclusions that may be logically irrefragable, but are as far removed from common sense as they are in accord with logic; at any rate they have failed to satisfy, and matter is no nearer being got rid of now than it was when the discussion first began. Others, again, have tried materialism, have declared the causative action of both thought and feeling to be deceptive, and posit matter obeying fixed laws of which thought and feeling must be admitted as concomitants, but with which they have no causal connection. The same thing has happened to these men as to their opponents; they made out an excellent case on paper, but thought and feeling still remain the mainsprings of action that they have been always held to be. We still say, "I gave him 5 pounds because I felt pleased with him, and thought he would like it;" or, "I knocked him down because I felt angry, and thought I would teach him better manners." Omnipresent life and mind with appearances of brute non-livingness--which appearances are deceptive; this is one view. Omnipresent non-livingness or mechanism with appearances as though the mechanism were guided and controlled by thought--which appearances are deceptive; this is the other. Between these two views the slaves of logic have oscillated for centuries, and to all appearance will continue to oscillate for centuries more.

People who think--as against those who feel and act--want hard and fast lines--without which, indeed, they cannot think at all; these lines are as it were steps cut on a slope of ice without which there would be no descending it. When we have begun to travel the downward path of thought, we ask ourselves questions about life and death, ego and non ego, object and subject, necessity and free will, and other kindred subjects. We want to know where we are, and in the hope of simplifying matters, strip, as it were, each subject to the skin, and finding that even this has not freed it from all extraneous matter, flay it alive in the hope that if we grub down deep enough we shall come upon it in its pure unalloyed state free from all inconvenient complication through intermixture with anything alien to itself. Then, indeed, we can docket it, and pigeon-hole it for what it is; but what can we do with it till we have got it pure? We want to account for things, which means that we want to know to which of the various accounts opened in our mental ledger we ought to carry them--and how can we do this if we admit a phenomenon to be neither one thing nor the other, but to belong to half-a-dozen different accounts in proportions which often cannot even approximately be determined? If we are to keep accounts we must keep them in reasonable compa.s.s; and if keeping them within reasonable compa.s.s involves something of a Procrustean arrangement, we may regret it, but cannot help it; having set up as thinkers we have got to think, and must adhere to the only conditions under which thought is possible; life, therefore, must be life, all life, and nothing but life, and so with death, free will, necessity, design, and everything else. This, at least, is how philosophers must think concerning them in theory; in practice, however, not even John Stuart Mill himself could eliminate all taint of its opposite from any one of these things, any more than Lady Macbeth could clear her hand of blood; indeed, the more nearly we think we have succeeded the more certain are we to find ourselves ere long mocked and baffled; and this, I take it, is what our biologists began in the autumn of 1879 to discover had happened to themselves.

For some years they had been trying to get rid of feeling, consciousness, and mind generally, from active partic.i.p.ation in the evolution of the universe. They admitted, indeed, that feeling and consciousness attend the working of the world's gear, as noise attends the working of a steam-engine, but they would not allow that consciousness produced more effect in the working of the world than noise on that of the steam-engine. Feeling and noise were alike accidental unessential adjuncts and nothing more. Incredible as it may seem to those who are happy enough not to know that this attempt is an old one, they were trying to reduce the world to the level of a piece of unerring though sentient mechanism. Men and animals must be allowed to feel and even to reflect; this much must be conceded, but granted that they do, still (so, at least, it was contended) it has no effect upon the result; it does not matter as far as this is concerned whether they feel and think or not; everything would go on exactly as it does and always has done, though neither man nor beast knew nor felt anything at all. It is only by maintaining things like this that people will get pensions out of the British public.

Some such position as this is a sine qua non for the Neo-Darwinistic doctrine of natural selection, which, as Von Hartmann justly observes, involves an essentially mechanical mindless conception of the universe; to natural selection's door, therefore, the blame of the whole movement in favour of mechanism must be justly laid. It was natural that those who had been foremost in preaching mindless designless luck as the main means of organic modification, should lend themselves with alacrity to the task of getting rid of thought and feeling from all share in the direction and governance of the world. Professor Huxley, as usual, was among the foremost in this good work, and whether influenced by Hobbes, or Descartes, or Mr.

Spalding, or even by the machine chapters in "Erewhon" which were still recent, I do not know, led off with his article "On the hypothesis that animals are automata" (which it may be observed is the exact converse of the hypothesis that automata are animated) in the Fortnightly Review for November 1874. Professor Huxley did not say outright that men and women were just as living and just as dead as their own watches, but this was what his article came to in substance. The conclusion arrived at was that animals were automata; true, they were probably sentient, still they were automata pure and simple, mere sentient pieces of exceedingly elaborate clockwork, and nothing more.

"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 advent.i.tious, 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 G.o.d 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 princ.i.p.al 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 pa.s.sing, 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:-