MR HUXLEY ON CONSCIOUS AUTOMATA.
MR. HUXLEY'S Lecture before the British Association, like in. Mr. Tyndall's, has at least this one merit,—it proves the paramount value of metaphysical inquiry in its broadest sense, the study of the laws of Mind. The world is very apt to deny that, to deem Metaphysics a sterile pursuit, to ridicule, some- times with reason, sometimes without, its imperfect terminology ; but the more it begins to Value the conclusions of "Science," the more satisfied it will be that those conclusions, to be com- pletely accepted Or frankly denied, must explain or fail to explain the phenomena of the mind. Professor Tyndall, for instance, refers everything, even the final cause, to Matter, but frankly admits that he does not yet know clearly what Matter is, and until he has comprehended one of its productions—till he has ex- plained fully to himself the material genesis of an abstract idea— his notion of Matter, on his own hypothesis, must be far from com- plete. Mr. Huxley affirms, as the result of his inquiries, that an animal—and man is, on one side of him, an animal—may be a machine, and is, as far as he can discover, a machine possessed of consciousness. We are not concerned just now to dispute that proposition. We do not believe it, knowing that the purely automatic movements, such, for example; as the shutting of the eye when light flashes on it, can be restrained by_ the movement of a Will which, in many of its actions, appears not only to be independent of automatic impulse, but to be hostile to it ; but we are not, for the moment, concerned with that con- troversy. Grant it as fully as Mr. Huxley propounds it—apart from his theory of the cause of consciousness—and still the most important question man can consider is the nature of con- sciousness, which can be discovered only through a scientific study of the laws of mind. Suppose, in opposition to every theory of intuition, and to an enormous number of visible phenomena—as, for example, the suspension of consciousness without the suspension of automatic action, a state of which the Professor gives numerous examples—that consciousness is the result of certain molecular action, and still we cannot prove that radical proposition, with its endless consequences, till we prove that the phenomena visible in the mind are really explicable by physiology,—till we can show, at all events, a large probability that they are not produced by some different, though unknown motor. Descartes thought they were, for his theory of the inde- pendence and correlation of the two powers, which Mr. Huxley seems to endorse, really amounts to that, eyen if we exclude the theological explanation which he offered, honestly or otherwise, to the consideration of his readers. Or suppose that conscious- ness is something a little different from a product of molecular forees--and it is a little difficult to conceive how they beget in the' dog, yet do not beget in the cat, a distinct and special affec- tion for the human race, an affection directly at variance with the feeling observable in most other creatures—still there is truth enough in the Automatic theory to make its limits matters of the last importance to humanity and its progress. And those limits can be ascertained, if at all, only through that study of the human mind which impatient persons—impatient, because they do not see how great in quantity the evidence of invisible facts must be, in opposition to the evidence of visible facts—consider inferior to the study of anatomy, or geology, or anything else which yields very quick or very indis- putable results. Or suppose, pushing hypotheses a little further, for the sake of exhaustion, that the intuition of man, whatever its cause, is by accident correct, and that there exists in the human animal a superinduced mind wholly independent of the molecules, and capable of dominating them in the most con- fusing manner, so that the cocoon, apparently made to turn out silk, does turn out cotton, still, the relation of that mind to its instrument must be the most important of conceivable subjects of study, must involve ultimately the whole question of the whence and the whither. Grant that this question is super- fluous, a waste of human energy, still, as all' experience proves that man will not give it up, a full examination of the impulses which have induced him to make that blunder is essential alike to the history of his past, which is interesting, and of his future, which is the motive for exertion. Under any hypothesis, these phenomena must be as well worth studying as the phenomena of the nerves or' spinal cord, and, indeed, a little better worth, because, while we know a great deal about the latter, we as yet have attained but little certitude about the former. We can predict with some accuracy what will happen if the spine is wounded' in a particular place, but we do not know what will happen exactly if we infuse a particular and, so to speak, wounding idea into a mind. John's poker will do some- thing conjectural to Tom's spine, but the effect on Tom's mind of the thought projected from John's brain, in the present state of our information, passes conjecture. Mr. Huxley relates, on the authority of the Debats, a story which he evidently believes, and which, therefore, we may, on his authority, and not that of the newspaper, employ as an illustration :— "I am indebted to my friend, General Strachey, for bringing to my notice the other day an account of a case which appeared within the last four or five days in the scientific article of the Journal des Debate. A French soldier, a serjeant, was wounded at the battle of Bazeilles, one, as you recollect, of the most fiercely contested battles of the late war. The man was shot in what we call the left parietal bone. The bullet,. I presume, glanced off, but it fractured the bone. He had enough vigour left to send his bayonet through the Prussian who shot him. Then he wandered a few hundred yards out of the village, where 'he was picked up and taken to the hospital, where he remained some time. When he came to himself, as usual in such cases of injury, he was para.- lysed on the opposite side of the body, that is to say, the right arm and the right leg were completely paralysed. That state, of things lasted, I think, the better part of two years, but sooner or later he recovered from it, and now he. is able to walk about with activity, and only by careful measurement can any difference between the two sides of his body be ascertained. The inquiry, the main results of which I shall give you, is conducted by exceedingly competent persons, and they report that at present this man lives two lives, a normal life and an abnormal life. In his normal life he is perfectly well, cheerful, and a capital hospital attendant, does all his work well, and is a respectable, well-conducted man. That normal life lasts for about seven and twenty days, or thereabouts, out of every month ; but for a day or two in each month—generally at intervals of about that time— he passes into another life, suddenly and without any warning or inti- mation. In this life he is still active, goes about just as usual, and is to all appearance just the same man as before, goes to bed and undresses himself, gets up, makes his cigarette and smokes it, and eats and drinks. But in this condition he neither sees, nor hears, nor tastes, nor smells, nor is he conscious of anything whatever, and has only one sense-organ in a state of activity, viz., that of touch, which is exceed- ingly delicate. If you put an obstacle in his way, he knocks against it, feels it and goes to the one side ; if you push him in any direction, he goes straight on, illustrating, as well as he can, the first law of motion. You see I have said he makes his cigarettes, but you may make his tobacco of shavings or of anything else you like, and, still he will go on- making his cigarettes as usual. His action is purely mechanical. As I said, he feeds voraciously, but whether you give him aloes or sass- fostida, or the nicest thing possible, it is all the same to him. He is just like my frog,—he goes on feeding. The man is in a condition absolutely parallel to that of the frog I have just described, and no doubt when he is in this condition, the functions of his cerebral hemisphere are, at any rate, largely annihilated. He is vet" nearly —I don't say whollyi but very nearly —in the condition of an animal in which the cerebral hemispheres are not entirely extirpated, but very largely damaged. And his state is wonderfully interesting to me, for it bears on the phenomena of mesmerism, of which I saw a good deal when I was a young man. In this state he is capable of performing all sorts of actions on mere suggestions—as, for example, he dropped his cane, and a person near him put it into his hand, and the feeling of the end of the cane evidently produced in him those molecular changes of the brain which, had he possessed consciousness, would have given rise to the idea of his rifle ; for he threw himself on his face, began feeling about for his oartouche, went through the motions of touching his gun and shouted out to an imaginary comrade, Here they are, a score ()Ahern ; but we will give a good account of them.' This paper to which I refer is full of the most remarkable examples of this kind, and what is the most remarkable fact of all is the modifications which this injury has made in the man's moral nature. In his normal life he is one of the most upright and honest of men. In his abnormal state, however, he is an inveterate thief. He will steal everything- he can lay his hands upon and if he cannot steal anything else' he will steal
his own things and hide them away. Now, if Descartes had bad this fact before him, need I tell you that his theory of animal automatism would have been enormously strengthened ?"
That, assuming the correctness of the account of the phenomena, is a wonderful " ease " for the anatomist or the physiologist ; but neither of them can explain it fully without the aid of the meta- physician, who as yet is further from certainty in his explanation than either of his colleagues. It is more important for him to be certain than for them, and yet he is less certain, and will remain less certain, until his investigations have been pursued with the ardour, the closeness, and the patience which have marked the great modern investigators of the physical laws. Even then the Newton of Metaphysics will have a more difficult task than the Newton of jcience, for he will be impeded by his difficulty in collecting Afficiently numerous data. He must study what he Can so rarely see, the mind in its lower or transitional aspects, -when unaffected by culture, or arrested by dimly-perceived causes, or
advancing by roads previously unknown to the investigator. It is the difficulty of his investigations that he can so rarely study all the links through which he must ultimately, and, as we hold, will ultimately, arrive at definite conclusions. He has seldom any- thing before him, to me an illustration drawn from the evidence for anatomical evolution, between the ascidian and the monkey, between the "conscious automaton," as Mr. Huxley defines the animal, and the highly cultivated man. The metaphysicians of Europe—and as yet, for practical purposes, the European meta- physicians stand alone—have before them the domestic animals and men of a high type, but of the conceivable links between them—of the utter savages and the developed savages, and the .semi-civilised men, and (strangest of all beings) the civilised men with arrested brains, they know either nothing, or so little as to feel no certitude even about phenomena. They do not know, have no means of knowing, except by calculations of analogies, which may be arbitrary, the exact phenomena of mind in a Veddah—the nearest approach to an animal in the British Empire, unless we give the palm to an Andamanese—or in a Feejeean, or in a Japanese, or in a Chinese, or in any of the races in which mind stands midway—or may, at all events, be supposed to stand midway—between the dog and Professor Huxley. No point, for example, in the controversy between the Theologians and the Naturalists is more important than the limits of the power exercised, especially over the body, by what we call the Will, and it is not in Europe that those limits will ever be finally mapped out. The man, or rather the series of men, who could do for mental inquiry what generations of naturalists have done for botanical inquiry—that is, accumulate from all 'countries and all races accurate data for the metaphysician to use—would render to human thought at least as great a service as the naturalists have ever rendered, possibly a greater one, for theology, . which may be independent of material facts—we do not assert that it is—cannot be independent • of mental, or to use the much wider term, which seems to annoy physiologists, of the spiritual phenomena presented by mankind. The contempt sometimes poured by naturalists on the minuteness or unreality of such inquiries is, on their own showing, absurd, for no evidence of mental action can, if their materialistic hypotheses are as important as they think, be superfluous or trivial. The naturalist may smile at an investigation of the laws regulating dreams, but in them lies, it may well be, the best evidence of the true relation between mind and matter, the exact truth at which they are endeavouring to arrive from the side of matter only. Mr. Huxley refused in epigrammatic sentences to waste time in ex- amining the phenomena of spiritualism, and so far as spiritualism is mere jugglery, say, ninety-nine hundredths of the distance, he is right; but if in the remaining one-hundredth the metaphysician .can discover evidence of mind exerting an external force, he will have done as much, or may have done as much, for mankind as the man who demonstrated the possibility of controlling, or rather using electricity. The naturalist thinks he is all in all, but the further he advances in his science, the nearer he gets to what he hopes may be absolute truth about Nature, the more will he need • the aid and recognise the value of the metaphysician, whom now, in the fullness of the discoverer's glee—often so like the glee of the child who finds a cornelian in the sands—he is tempted to .despise.
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