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 qua 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.”