THE AUTOMATIST THEORY.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTAT0R:1 SIR,—There is a set of facts which no one of your correspondents on the Conscious-automaton question has yet noticed, but which would seem to throw a ray of light, though a feeble one, on its solution. It has long been observed that, in the main, pleasure accompanies such experiences as are conducive to the welfare of our organism, while those which are detrimental to its con- servation are also repugnant to our feeling. Breathing, eat- ing and drinking, seeking warmth and shunning burns, shunning wounds, resting from fatigue, and exercising after rest, are so many examples of what I mean. The mass of bodily plea- Bures falls under the law. Cases which may be pointed out of " vicioul indulgence" impair its universality, but do not diminish its importance. Whence this harmony between the pleasure an act gives us and its utility ? Mr. Herbert Spencer tries to account for it by natural selection. Those species in which useful actions happened to be pleasant habitually persevered in them and survived, whilst those species in which no pleasure accom panied the beneficial experience ceased to seek the latter, and became all the sooner extinct. This theory, of course, assumes the falsity of the conscious-automaton hypothesis, inasmuch as it asserts pleasure to be an effective guide to action, and pain an effective check,—not mere shadows or comments running alongside the chain of acts, but having no dynamic 'connection with it. If we deny the harmony to have been evolved in some such dynamic, empirical way as this, we can only account for it, it seems to me, by some a priori teleological hypothesis, which will probably be even less palatable to the 4' automatist" school than that common-sense notion which it mow repudiates of the causality of our conscious states. It seems impossible that any man who knows on what kind of evidence the doctrine of the conservation of energy is based, should affect -to consider it of any further pertinence in the realm of psycho- physics than as suggesting hypotheses for concrete experience to -verify and decide. Thus it suggests the possibility of the sum of energy being always constant in the cerebral events, without taking account of the conscious events which run parallel to them ; this is the Spalding-Huxley theory. It also suggests the possi- bility that the event in consciousness must be counted in to keep -the sum of energy constant ; or, in other words, that conscious- mess is one of the " correlated " group of forces ; this is Dr. Carpenter's theory, in part.
Or again, on the other hand, the theory of conservation, only probably true in physics, may be untrue in psycho-physics. Specific observation in the specific subject-matter under discus- -Bien can alone decide what without it is but a conception, or at best a presumption. And if great scientific men like Mr. Huxley begin to abandon wholly that method of verification which alone has entitled them to treat theologians de haul en bas, to affirm as true whatever they happen distinctly to conceive as possible, and -to forestall criticism of their ideas by appealing to the popular .dislike of a certain class of men, viz., ecclesiastics, why it is high time that the wide-spread belief in the excellence of scientific training and the superior certainty of doctrines which scientific mien vouch for should be exploded, and that we should all come 'down again to a common level of authority (or no-authority) in 'discussion.
Mr. Spalding's eagerness to claim priority seems rather un- mecessary in the case of an hypothesis which every physiologist .who ever grasped clearly the notion of reflex action, and extended it to the brain, must long ago have entertained among his alter- matives of possibility. That physiologists should not have often stated it as an hypothesis, much less affirmed it as an anti-ecclesi- astical dogma, has probably arisen from its essentially speculative -nature in the present state of our knowledge. Among speculators by profession, Mr. Shadworth Hodgson has treated it most ably and profoundly in his "Theory of Practice," and solved it in the -same sense as Mr. Spalding.
I will only add that I am not unaware of the inconsistency -there seems to be between Mr. Spencer's treatment of the subject of pleasures and pains, and some other parts of his philosophic
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