the exact converse of the hypothesis that automata are animated) in
the Fortnightly Review for November 1874. Professor Huxley did not
say outright that men and women were just as living and just as dead
as their own watches, but this was what his article came to in
substance. The conclusion arrived at was that animals were
automata; true, they were probably sentient, still they were
automata pure and simple, mere sentient pieces of exceedingly
elaborate clockwork, and nothing more.

"Professor Huxley," says Mr. Romanes, in his Rede Lecture for 1885,
{140a} "argues by way of perfectly logical deduction from this
statement, that thought and feeling have nothing to do with
determining action; they are merely the bye-products of cerebration,
or, as he expresses it, the indices of changes which are going on in
the brain. Under this view we are all what he terms conscious
automata, or machines which happen, as it were by chance, to be
conscious of some of their own movements. But the consciousness is
altogether adventitious, and bears the same ineffectual relation to
the activity of the brain as a steam whistle bears to the activity
of a locomotive, or the striking of a clock to the time-keeping
adjustments of the clockwork. Here, again, we meet with an echo of
Hobbes, who opens his work on the commonwealth with these words:-

"'Nature, the art whereby God hath made and governs the world, is by
the ART of man, as in many other things, in this also imitated, that
it can make an artificial animal. For seeing life is but a motion
of limbs, the beginning whereof is in the principal part within; why
may we not say that all automata (engines that move themselves by
springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life? For
what is the HEART but a spring, and the NERVES but so many STRINGS;