consciousness attend the working of the world's gear, as noise
attends the working of a steam-engine, but they would not allow that
consciousness produced more effect in the working of the world than
noise on that of the steam-engine. Feeling and noise were alike
accidental unessential adjuncts and nothing more. Incredible as it
may seem to those who are happy enough not to know that this attempt
is an old one, they were trying to reduce the world to the level of
a piece of unerring though sentient mechanism. Men and animals must
be allowed to feel and even to reflect; this much must be conceded,
but granted that they do, still (so, at least, it was contended) it
has no effect upon the result; it does not matter as far as this is
concerned whether they feel and think or not; everything would go on
exactly as it does and always has done, though neither man nor beast
knew nor felt anything at all. It is only by maintaining things
like this that people will get pensions out of the British public.

Some such position as this is a sine qua non for the Neo-Darwinistic
doctrine of natural selection, which, as Von Hartmann justly
observes, involves an essentially mechanical mindless conception of
the universe; to natural selection's door, therefore, the blame of
the whole movement in favour of mechanism must be justly laid. It
was natural that those who had been foremost in preaching mindless
designless luck as the main means of organic modification, should
lend themselves with alacrity to the task of getting rid of thought
and feeling from all share in the direction and governance of the
world. Professor Huxley, as usual, was among the foremost in this
good work, and whether influenced by Hobbes, or Descartes, or Mr.
Spalding, or even by the machine chapters in "Erewhon" which were
still recent, I do not know, led off with his article "On the
hypothesis that animals are automata" (which it may be observed is