as those of sensitive instruments—with no intelligence whatever in the action.'
Now, while the word automaton, in the literal sense, may be offensive as applied to man, coupled with the word 'conscious' it merely signifies a negation of the doctrine of free will or uncaused action. In other words, Huxley suggests that the state of consciousness preceding any so-called voluntary act is merely a part of the mechanism of that act, and not its cause, the cause being found in immediate external stimuli and molecular conditions, the result of the accumulated effects of more remote external stimuli incident during both individual and ancestral existence, and forming links in a long chain of causation which is finally lost in the infinite and absolute cause of all things.
Professor Shaler laboriously seeks to prove by Huxley's own familiar arguments the analogy between the psychic life of animals and that of man. It is really amusing to find Huxley, the author of 'Man's Place in Nature' and always a believer in the continuity of organic life, credited with doctrines actually subversive of his most cherished theories.
The philosophers of the extreme 'Darwinian' and monistic schools would be astonished and shocked, I am sure, to learn that they have committed philosophical 'hari kari' by regarding an elephant as an automaton. Surely the formation of species by the almost inconceivably slow and gradual process described by Darwin is incompatible with any theory calling for the sudden appearance of conscious man. Such a theory might be held more consistently by De Vries or others who question the validity of Darwin's generalizations and ask us to believe in the sudden 'mutation' of species.
One is loath to believe Professor Shaler serious in his statement that the monists have sought to establish their conception of the universe by exploiting a distinctly dualistic theory. Ernst Haeckel, who may be cited as a type of the extreme monistic school, asserts his belief that consciousness in the true sense of the word is present in all organisms having a centralized nervous system; furthermore, Haeckel invites us to the study of the 'sublime monism of Spinoza,' which, after all, is the very pantheism which Professor Shaler says has never held an important place in occidental philosophy.
It is not a far cry from Spinoza's self-existent universal substance, of which consciousness is only a mode, or Schelling's 'world soul' composed of the union of a positive and negative principle to Spencer's 'unknowable absolute.' In Spinoza and Schelling we have the pantheism of the East purified and shorn of its allegory and imagery. In Spencer we have the essentially modern, scientific arrangement of the data of our consciousness leading to conclusions only faintly adumbrated in the hazy speculations of a priori philosophers.
It has become the fashion lately in certain quarters to disparage the work of that splendid band of truth seekers who created modern science, not only by what they contributed in exact knowledge, but by the inspiration they afforded others and the impetus they gave to rational methods of research and speculation. Doubtless the generalizations of the great evolutionists will be modified by advancing knowledge, but I am confident that far into the future the pathway blazed by these men through the wilderness of ignorance, tradition and error will always be found leading towards truth, though possibly at times through tortuous ways. Hero worship and the weight of authority should not be permitted to stay the march of progress, but the cause of science is not best served by reading into the works of the great men of the past views which they would have been the first to repudiate.
| Eug. L. Fisk. |
| New York. |
