“‘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:—
“Against Mr. Lewes’s proposition that the movements of living beings are prompted and guided by feeling, I urged that the amount and direction of every nervous discharge must depend solely on physical conditions. And I contended that to see this clearly is to see that when we speak of movement being guided by feeling, we use the language of a less advanced stage of enlightenment. This view has since occupied a good deal of attention. Under the name of automatism it has been advocated by Professor Huxley, and with firmer logic by Professor Clifford. In the minds of our savage ancestors feeling was the source of all movement . . . Using the word feeling in its ordinary sense . . . we assert not only that no evidence can be given that feeling ever does guide or prompt action, but that the process of its doing so is inconceivable. (Italics mine.) How can we picture to ourselves a state of consciousness putting in motion any particle of matter, large or small? Puss, while dozing before the fire, hears a light rustle in the corner, and darts towards the spot. What has happened? Certain sound-waves have reached the ear, a series of physical changes have taken place within the organism, special groups of muscles have been called into play, and the body of the cat has changed its position on the floor. Is it asserted that this chain of physical changes is not at all points complete and sufficient in itself?”
I have been led to turn to this article of Mr. Spalding’s by Mr. Stewart Duncan, who, in his “Conscious Matter,” [142a] quotes the latter part of the foregoing extract. Mr. Duncan goes on to quote passages from Professor Tyndall’s utterances of about the same date which show that he too took much the same line—namely, that there is no causative connection between mental and physical processes; from this it is obvious he must have supposed that physical processes would go on just as well if there were no accompaniment of feeling and consciousness at all.
I have said enough to show that in the decade, roughly, between 1870 and 1880 the set of opinion among our leading biologists was strongly against mind, as having in any way influenced the development of animal and vegetable life, and it is not likely to be denied that the prominence which the mindless theory of natural selection had assumed in men’s thoughts since 1860 was one of the chief reasons, if not the chief, for the turn opinion was taking. Our leading biologists had staked so heavily upon natural selection from among fortuitous variations that they would have been more than human if they had not caught at everything that seemed to give it colour and support. It was while this mechanical fit was upon them, and in the closest connection with it, that the protoplasm boom developed. It was doubtless felt that if the public could be got to dislodge life, consciousness, and mind from any considerable part of the body, it would be no hard matter to dislodge it, presently, from the remainder; on this the deceptiveness of mind as a causative agent, and the sufficiency of a purely automatic conception of the universe, as of something that will work if a penny be dropped into the box, would be proved to demonstration. It would be proved from the side of mind by considerations derivable from automatic and unconscious action where mind ex hypothesi was not, but where action went on as well or better without it than with it; it would be proved from the side of body by what they would doubtless call the “most careful and exhaustive” examination of the body itself by the aid of appliances more ample than had ever before been within the reach of man.
This was all very well, but for its success one thing was a sine quâ non—I mean the dislodgment must be thorough; the key must be got clean of even the smallest trace of blood, for unless this could be done all the argument went to the profit not of the mechanism, with which, for some reason or other, they were so much enamoured, but of the soul and design, the ideas which of all others were most distasteful to them. They shut their eyes to this for a long time, but in the end appear to have seen that if they were in search of an absolute living and absolute non-living, the path along which they were travelling would never lead them to it. They were driving life up into a corner, but they were not eliminating it, and, moreover, at the very moment of their thinking they had hedged it in and could throw their salt upon it, it flew mockingly over their heads and perched upon the place of all others where they were most scandalised to see it—I mean upon machines in use. So they retired sulkily to their tents baffled but not ashamed.
Some months subsequent to the completion of the foregoing chapter, and indeed just as this book is on the point of leaving my hands, there appears in Nature [144a] a letter from the Duke of Argyll, which shows that he too is impressed with the conviction expressed above—I mean that the real object our men of science have lately had in view has been the getting rid of mind from among the causes of evolution. The Duke says:—
“The violence with which false interpretations were put upon this theory (natural selection) and a function was assigned to it which it could never fulfil, will some day be recognised as one of the least creditable episodes in the history of science. With a curious perversity it was the weakest elements in the theory which were seized upon as the most valuable, particularly the part assigned to blind chance in the occurrence of variations. This was valued not for its scientific truth,—for it could pretend to none,—but because of its assumed bearing upon another field of thought and the weapon it afforded for expelling mind from the causes of evolution.”
The Duke, speaking of Mr. Herbert Spencer’s two articles in the Nineteenth Century for April and May, 1886, to which I have already called attention, continues:—