About the same time Mr.Spalding, and a little later Messrs.Huxley and Clifford, gave great publicity to an identical doctrine, though in their case it was backed by less refined metaphysical considerations.
A few sentences from Huxley and Clifford may be subjoined to make the matter entirely clear.Professor Huxley says:
"The consciousness of brutes 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 on its machinery.Their volition, if they have any, is an emotion indicative of physical changes, not a cause of such changes...The soul stands related to the body as the bell of a clock to the works, and consciousness answers to the sound which the bell gives out when it is struck...Thus far I have strictly confined myself to the automatism of brutes...It is quite true that, to the best of my judgment, the argumentation which applies to brutes holds equally good of men; and, therefore, that all states of consciousness in us, as in them, are immediately caused by molecular changes of the brain-substance.It seems to me 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.If these positions are well based, it follows 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."
Professor Clifford writes:
"All the evidence that we have goes to show that the physical world gets along entirely by itself, according to practically universal rules.
...The train of physical facts between the stimulus sent into the eye, or to any one of our senses, and the exertion which follows it, and the train of physical facts which goes on in the brain, even when there is no stimulus and no exertion, - these are perfectly complete physical trains, and every step is fully accounted for by mechanical conditions....The two things are on utterly different platforms - the physical facts go along by themselves, and the mental facts go along by themselves.There is a parallelism between them, but there is no interference of one with the other.Again, if anybody says that the will influences matter, the statement is not untrue, but it is nonsense.Such an assertion belongs to the crude materialism of the savage.The only thing which influences matter is the position of surrounding matter or the motion of surrounding matter.
...The assertion that another man's volition, a feeling in his consciousness that I cannot perceive, is part of the train of physical facts which I
may perceive, - this is neither true non untrue, but nonsense; it is a combination of words whose corresponding ideas will not go together..
..Sometimes one series is known better, and sometimes the other; so that in telling a story we speak sometimes of mental and sometimes of material facts.A feeling of chill made a man run; strictly speaking, the nervous disturbance which coexisted with that feeling of chill made him run, if we want to talk about material facts; or the feeling of chill produced the form of sub-consciousness which coexists with the motion of legs, if we want to talk about mental facts....When, therefore, we ask: 'What is the physical link between the ingoing message from chilled skin and the outgoing message which moves the leg?' and the answer is, 'A man's will,' we have as much right to be amused as if we had asked our friend with the picture what pigment was used in painting the cannon in the foreground, and received the answer, 'Wrought iron.' It will be found excellent practice in the mental operations required by this doctrine to imagine a train, the fore part of which is an engine and three carriages linked with iron couplings, and the hind part three other carriages linked with iron couplings;
the bond between the two parts being made up out of the sentiments of amity subsisting between the stoker and the guard."
To comprehend completely the consequences of the dogma so confidently enunciated, one should unflinchingly apply it to the most complicated examples.
The movements of our tongues and pens, the flashings of our eyes in conversation, are of course events of a material order, and as such their causal antecedents must be exclusively material.If we knew thoroughly the nervous system of Shakespeare, and as thoroughly all his environing conditions, we should be able to show why at a certain period of his life his hand came to trace on certain sheets of paper those crabbed little black marks which we for shortness' sake call the manuscript of Hamlet.We should understand the rationale of every erasure and alteration therein, and we should understand all this without in the slightest degree acknowledging the existence of the thoughts in Shakespeare's mind.The words and sentences would be taken, not as signs of anything beyond themselves, but as little outward facts, pure and ******.In like manner we might exhaustively write the biography of those two hundred pounds, more or less, of warmish albuminoid matter called Martin Luther, without ever implying that it felt.
