perhaps eaten; let us therefore spring upon the tag" and they spring
upon it. Cats are above this; yet give the cat something which
presents a few more of those appearances which she is accustomed to
see whenever she sees life, and she will fall as easy a prey to the
power which association exercises over all that lives as the kitten
itself. Show her a toy-mouse that can run a few yards after being
wound up; the form, colour, and action of a mouse being here, there
is no good cat which will not conclude that so many of the
appearances of mousehood could not be present at the same time
without the presence also of the remainder. She will, therefore,
spring upon the toy as eagerly as the kitten upon the tag.

Suppose the toy more complex still, so that it might run a few yards,
stop, and run on again without an additional winding up; and suppose
it so constructed that it could imitate eating and drinking, and
could make as though the mouse were cleaning its face with its paws.
Should we not at first be taken in ourselves, and assume the presence
of the remaining facts of life, though in reality they were not
there? Query, therefore, whether a machine so complex as to be
prepared with a corresponding manner of action for each one of the
successive emergencies of life as it arose, would not take us in for
good and all, and look so much as if it were alive that, whether we
liked it or not, we should be compelled to think it and call it so;
and whether the being alive was not simply the being an exceedingly
complicated machine, whose parts were set in motion by the action
upon them of exterior circumstances; whether, in fact, man was not a
kind of toy-mouse in the shape of a man, only capable of going for
seventy or eighty years, instead of half as many seconds, and as much
more versatile as he is more durable? Of course I had an uneasy
feeling that if I thus made all plants and men into machines, these