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 passage, but from a scientific point of view it is unassailable. 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 hell, 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 God? 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 assuredly 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 entity 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 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 compass; and if keeping them within reasonable compass 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 participation 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 quâ 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 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:—