PROFESSOR HUXLEY ON ANIMAL AUTOMATA.
IN the interesting and lucid paper in the Fortnightly Review in which Professor Huxley reproduces, with modifications and extensions, his British-Association address at Belfast, he hardly exhibits the full composure with which he usually meets the attacks made upon his bold theories. Indeed, in his sarcastic remarks upon the tattoos on "the dram ecclesiastic" with which his 'views have been received, he betrays a feeling which is more creditable to his human sympathies than to his intellectual firm- ness, —that is,.he appeals to the authority of persons like Jonathan Edwards and Dr. Hartley, who held the same view of the automatic mechanism of human life which he holds, but who did not combineit with strictly "know-nothing" religious opinions. But surely this appeal is not quite reasonable in Professor Huxley, for he must be aware that not only the world, but many very philosophic minds —his own, we fancy, among them, at least in reference to the proper relation between the law and the free inculcation of private opinion on the young,—have drawn the widest distinction between persons who, though holding doctrines which are pregnant with what are held to beverydangerous consequences, do not draw those consequences, but combine them with an inconsistent acceptance of what are thought the safer views, and persons who, holding the same doctrines, push them, to their logical issue, and teach what appears to be -directly inconsistent with the public welfare. Now, no doubt, in some respects Jonathan Edwards and Dr. Hartley did hold views closely allied to Professor Huxley's as to the automatic character of human action. But then they did not also hold those views as to the degree of authority to be attached to religious impressions, and the inferences to be drawn from certain alleged occurrences of the order called supernatural and miracu- - lous, which really hang together with Professor Huxley's view of "The Relativity of Knowledge ;" and it is hardly like Professor Huxley to _appeal to the authority, of persons who, while apparently holding his premisses, did not hold his most startling conclusion, for the purpose of rebuking an outcry which is directed far less against his philosophic premisses than against his well-known agnostic conclusion. He would have done better, we think, to ignore that outcry altogether, though we confess we do not like him the less for being anxious to quote, somewhat inappo- sitely, great religious authorities on his own side of the question. Philosophers who have held that men are mere automata, but automata capable of knowing the absolute will of God and of being conformed themselves to it, are not likely to cause the same alarm in a society which supposes religion to be of the essence of its organisation, which those will inspire who argue, more consistently as we think, from the same assumptions to the conclusion that "the problem as to the ultimate cause of existence is one which is hopelessly out of reach of our poor powers."
However, that is , by the way. Professor Huxley's paper at Belfast, as he has re-edited it for the November Fortnightly, is intended to give reasons for believing that "in men, as in brutes, there is no proof that any state of consciousness is the cause of change in the motion of the matter of the organism," that "our mental conditions are simply the symbols in consciousness of the changes which take place automatically in the organism, and that to take an extreme illustration, the feeling we call volition 'is not the cause of. a voluntary act, but the symbol of that state of the brain which is the immediate cause of that act. We are conscious automata, endowed with free-will in the only in- telligible sense of that much-abused term—inasmuch as in many respects we Are able to do as we like—but none the leas parts of the great series of causes and effects which in unbroken continuity composes that which is, and has been, and shall be,—the sum of exist- ence." Or to quote a sentence which explains Professor Huxley's doctrine in language still more lucid and forcible, "the conscious- ness of brutes" [and this statement is afterwards expressly ex- tended to the consciousness of men] "would appear to be related to the mechanism of their body simply as a collateral product of its working, and to be as completely without any power of modifying that working, as the steam-whistle which accompanies the work of a locomotive engine is without influence upon its machinery. Their volition, if they have any, is an emotion indicative of physical changes, not a cause of such changes."
The phenomena on the consideration of which Professor Huxley bases this broad, startling, and in our belief, false inference, are those which have been long known to physiologists, and are now getting gradually known to the rest of the world, under the name of " reflex action." If the spinal cord of a man be divided in the middle of the back, the skin of the foot may be cut, or pinched, or burned without any sensation of which the patient is conscious ; nor-can he move his legs by any volition of his own ; but never- theless, if the soles of his feet be tickled, they are drawn up just as vigorously as they would have been before the injury
"If the spinal cord of a frog is cut across, so as to provide us with a segment separated from the brain, we shall have a subject parallel to the injured man on which experiments can be made without remorse; as we have a right to conclude that a frog's spinal cord is not likely to be conscious when a man's is not. Now the frog behaves just as the man did. The legs are utterly paralyzed, so far as voluntary movement is fencerned ; but they are vigorously drawn up to the body, when any irritant is applied to the foot. But let us study our frog a little further. Touch the skin of the side of the body with a little acetic acid, which gives rise to all the signs of great pain in an uninjured frog. In this case there can be no pain, because the application is made to a part of the skin supplied with nerves which come off from the cord below the point of section ; nevertheless, the frog lifts up the limb of the same side, and applies the foot to rub off the acetic acid ; and, what is still more remarkable, if the limb be held so that the frog cannot use it, it will by and by, move the limb of the other side, turn it across the body, and use it for the same robbing process. It is impossible that the frog, if it were in its entirety and could reason, should perform actions more pur- posive than these ; and yet we have most complete assurance that, in this case, the froo. is not acting from purpose, has no consciousness,_and is a mere automatic machine."
Moreover, it appears that if a certain injury to a certain porlien (the forehead) of the frog's brain occurs, the frog still performs with the greatest precision a number of other operations which wesheuld usually attribute to animal consciousness, so far as the frog has such consciousness, though showing such remarkable gaps in its ordinary procedure, as to prove that all spontaneity of motion or activity is gone. Now, there is a case of a French serjeant injured by a ball in the forehead at the battle of Bazeilles, to Whom a similar loss of spon- taneity happens once in, from fifteen to thirty days, lasting for from .fifteen to thirty hours, when it does occur. For the other four- teen or twenty-nine days-he is in every respect his ordinary self, but-when the periodic return of the disease comes on, alth ough he does mechanically very much that in ordinary states he does consciously, he appears to be insensible to pain,—to electric shocks, for instance, or the wounds of pins, —and takes asafetida or vinegar as readily as water without betraying any consciousness of the difference, and though he seems to betray a certain amount of sensitiveness to light and power of sight, when the sight is needed to help him in any process in which the faculty of touch is the chief ins rument, in general he appears to be virtually blind " Sitting at a table, in one of his abnormal states, he took up a pen, felt for paper and ink, and began to write a letter to his General, in which he recommended himself for a medal, on account of his good con- duct and courage. It occurred to Dr. Hemet to ascertain experiment- ally how far vision was concerned in this act of writing. He therefore interposed a screen between the man's eyes and his hands ; under these circumstances he went on writing for a short time, but the words became illegible, and he finally stopped, without manifesting any discontent. On the withdrawal of the screen he began to write again where he had left off. The substitution of water for ink in the inkstand had a similar result. He stopped, looked at his pen, wiped it on his coat, dipped it in the water and began again, with the same effect. On one occasion, he began to write upon the topmost of ten super-imposed sheets of paper. After he had written a line or two, this sheet was suddenly drawn away. There was slight expression of surprise, but he continued his letter on the second sheet exactly as if it had been the first. This operation was repeated five times, so that the fifth sheet contained nothing but the writer's signature at the bottom of the page. Nevertheless, when the signature was finished, his eyes turned to the top of the blank sheet, and, he went through the form of reading over what he had written, a movement of the lips accompanying each word ; moreover, with his pen, he put in such corrections as were needed, in that part of the blank page which corresponded with the position of the worda.which required correction in the sheets which had been taken away. If the five sheets had been transparent, therefore, they would, when superposed, have
formed a properly-written and corrected letter From these and other experiments Dr. Mesnet draws the conclusion that his patient sees some things and not others; that the sense of sight is accessible to all things which are brought into relation with him by the sense of touch, and on the contrary, insensible to things whioh lie outside this relation. He sees the match he holds, and does not see any other."
Now, these and kindred phenomena appear to Professor Huxley to justify the impression that animals, and if animals, then men, are simply automata, with, in addition, an apparatus for feeling, in- cluding, of course, the class of feelings we call knowledge and loll- tion,—this outlying apparatus having, however, no more influence on the course of events, except so far as these different feelings are themselves events, than a steam-whistle has on the machinery of the locomotive. He does not set out his reason for this conclusion half as clearly as he sets out the facts on which he grounds it. But as we
understand it, his reason is mainly this :—We see, under certain abnormal states of the animal mechanism, both men and animals performing, without any trace of consciousness, very complicated acts, which have been usually regarded as proceeding out of con- sciousness. In other abnormal states of the mechanism (such as paralysis), we find the states of consciousness (wish, volition, &c.,) which usually precede these actions, complete, but we do not find them followed by these actions ; hence, if the animal mechanism is often equal to very elaborate work without consciousness, and in other cases consciousness is not equal to that same work when the animal mechanism is in disorder, consciousness may be regarded as a non-essential part of the mechanism,—something that, like a barometer or thermometer, registers (when it is in proper order) the changes of the medium in which it is placed, but has nothing to do with causing the changes in that medium.
Such is, we presume, the general character of the argument. But, to our minds, one which ignores more conspicuously the most essential facts in the case has seldom been conceived. In the first place, on the face of the evidence, the lesion of the brain which takes away the power of spontaneous origination, leaving only that of responding automatically to impressions already organised in some deep-seated habit, also almost completely takes away consciousness, and no one can say whether the loss of conscious- ness immediately causes the loss of spontaneity, or the loss of spontaneity the loss of consciousness, or whether both are direct effects of the injury to the brain. Until you can get an automaton capable of striking out a new line of rational action, without knowing it to be rational, the audacious notion that consciousness is a mere mirror, in which a particular state of the brain is (needlessly, as far as action is concerned) symbolised, is not, properly speaking, even suggested. In the next place, what is Professor Hurley's rationale of the difference between the states of consciousness in which, as we well know, consciousness is a symbol to us of a bodily process, and nothing more, and the states of consciousness in which all men (even including Professor Huxley) are liable to the illusion that the consciousness is much more than a note of what is going to happen,—an essential. condition and cause of what is going to happen ? Almost all the things which the French serjeant does unconsciously, we know ourselves to do habitually, not indeed unconsciously, but without any in- tervention byway of volition in the procedure. Just as we know when we are going to sneeze, but never dream that our knowledge that we are going to sneeze is a necessary condition or cause of the sneeze, so we often know that we are going to sleep, or getting up, or buttoning our clothes, or stamping, or whistling, or moving our lips, without believing that that knowledge of ours has anything to do with the completion of the procedure. But on the other hand, if I determine to read Professor Huxley's-article, I do know, or I think I know, that that state of consciousness is an absolutely essential link in the chain of causes which leads to the bodily action of fixing my eyes on the paper, and taking up the Fortnightly Review into my hands. And similarly I know, or think I know, that when I have to choose between right and wrong, and delay the choice for the very purpose of pondering, or summoning resolution to make the choice, not only a necessary element, but the main element of all, in the determination of the future action of the organism itself, on this point, depends on the act of consciousness ; and that if the act of consciousness were wanting, the result to the physical organism itself would be altogether different.
Professor Huxley's argument, then, drawn from maimed condi- tions of the organism, seems to us to miss the only positive and instructive evidence we have, on the subject of the relation of the state of consciousness to the action of the organism. He believes
tinhatsowmheenstaweteasu,pIposeexpoeurertzewlvhesattonobte adothinnogt, tthheinvkolition stands precisely in the same relation to the action in which' the shriek of the railway-whistle stands to the presence of steam in the passage which leads to it, or in which the uncomfortable conscious- ness attending a sneeze standsto the completed sneeze. But if that be so, why is not the consciousness limited to producing the ex- pectation? Why does the fantastic illusion intrude itself, and apparently on good grounds, that the consciousness is essential to the happening of the thing expected,—which we seldom suppose to be the case when it is certainly not so? Is it philosophical to give us the same rationale of two absolutely different states ?—
I can cause, but what I am sure I cannot prevent. In others, I do not know what to expect, but I do know that whatever happens, no state of my mind will control it. In other cases, again, I am doubtful whether my consciousness is a link in the chain of causes or not, and then I may take up either with the wrong or the true hypothesis about it. Finally, there are cases in which I know perfectly well that with- out my conscious willing a thing to happen, it cannot happen, and that with that conscious effort it can and will ; and yet, as far as we can see, Professor Iluxley's rationale accounts for all these different cases on precisely the same principle,—as if they were one and the same. Surely this is not the philosophy of physiology, but physiology shouldering philosophy out of doors in the most unceremonious way. And as for the psychology of the lower animals, we submit that the rationale of the processes going on in the higher at least, of those animals, should be deter- mined by the fuller knowledge we have of the processes of the human mind, and not vice versa. Until we get the experience of some one who has gone through a metempsychosis from a brute into a man, it will be safer to reason by analogy from our fuller knowledge of our own nature to what happens in their case, than to gather from our guess of what happens in their case inappro- priate missiles with which to assail the most positive and precise asseverations of our own self-knowledge.
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