“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