88

The teleological view.

[LECT.

universe are the consequences; and the more completely is he thereby at the mercy of the teleologist, who can always defy him to disprove that this primordial molecular arrangement was not intended to evolve the phenomena of the universe." And let me cite another witness, of the thoroughness of whose evolutionism you will entertain no doubt. "We are obliged," says Herbert Spencer, "to regard every phenomenon as a manifestation of some Power by which we are acted upon; though omnipresence is unthinkable, yet, as experience discloses no bounds to the diffusion of phenomena, we are unable to think of limits to the presence of this Power; while the criticisms of science teach us that this Power is incomprehensible. And this consciousness of an incomprehensible Power, called omnipresent from inability to assign its limits, is just that consciousness on which religion dwells."2

I can fancy that at this point some of you may say—“ this conception of design in the arrangement of the primitive worldstuff reconciles the idea of God, the Creator and Ruler, with the theory of evolution and the orderly procedure of nature: but we fail to see how this God can be a God who hears and answers prayer." To this I would briefly reply, that the more thorough a believer you are in evolution, the more readily you will admit that the prayers we offer up are themselves potentially contained in the original design, and that there is no scientific reason why an answer to them should not be there also.

The time which remains is far too short to allow us to consider fully this as well as many other subjects which crowd in upon us. Two of them only I shall speak of very shortly: namely, the relation of those events which are called miracles to the order of nature; and the physical aspect of the old philosophic question of the freedom of the will.

1Critiques and addresses, p. 274.

2 First Principles, p. 99.

II.]

Miracle and Law.

89

If by miracle we mean an occurrence which lies outside of the order of nature as that order is determined by our common experience, then there are two ways in which we may reconcile a belief in miracles with the teachings of science and the scheme of evolution. In the first place, it may be that our common experience has led us to a conclusion which, though true in general, is not universally true. The mathematician Babbage showed that a machine-a mere collection of wheels and leversmight be made which would grind out results according to one definite law for any assignable time, and would at some fixed instant (determined by the original construction and setting of the machine) produce one exception to the general law, after which it would return to that again, and all this without any interference from outside. Now there is nothing inconceivable in the idea that the primordial arrangement of atoms which the extreme theory of evolution assumes may, like Babbage's machine, in general give results following one observed method, which, because it is usual, we call the law of its action, and may also give occasional results of an exceptional character, which we regard as violations of law only because we have generalized too rashly. Or, to take another view: there is nothing in science to negative the idea that creative intelligence may really interfere with the course of events, in the sense of introducing a new action not deducible from the preceding states and actions of the system. There may be, from time to time, real influences proceeding from the unseen, like those which, in fact, we are forced to believe occurred at the creation of matter, probably also at the first appearance of life, and possibly also (as some scientific men maintain) at the first appearance of man. The will of a higher being may, for all we can tell, affect the course of events, and the exercise of its influences may or may not be subject to conditions like those under which (as most of us believe) the will of man has a real determining power.

90

Animal Automatism and

[LECT.

And this brings me to the last point to which I must ask your attention-the relation of the human will to the course of natural events.

Many actions that are performed by the body are performed quite apart from any conscious volition-such as the beating of the heart, or the ordinary act of breathing. And when you wink your eyelids in response to a clap of the hands, or the falling of a hammer on an anvil, or a sudden flash of light, your body performs this action of its own accord. So far as we can judge, such actions, done without the consciousness of will, are strictly mechanical: a stimulus travels up a nerve, is reflected, so to speak, down another, and starts the movement of the appropriate muscles. Hence these actions are called reflex, and in performing them the body is said to act automatically— that is, like a machine which merely responds in a determinate manner to mechanical influences. Now physiological observations and experiments have shown that a great many very complicated actions may be performed by the body of an animal or a man under conditions which forbid us to suppose that there is either volition or consciousness. A man, for instance, whose spinal cord has been divided becomes incapable of feeling any pain in the parts of his body below the place of injury, or of moving his limbs at the dictation of his will. But these limbs are nevertheless able to move of themselves, and if you tickle his foot with a feather you will find it is drawn up as vigorously as if he felt the irritation, and as if he purposely sought to escape from it. But he does not feel it, and even if he wished to draw up his foot he could not do so: the leg literally moves of itself in response to the stimulus: the action is apparently as truly mechanical as the action of a telegraph instrument when the operator touches its key. And it is astonishing to find what complicated actions-actions which we should certainly hold to be conscious and intentional did we not know them to be un

II.]

the Freedom of the Will.

91

conscious and mechanical-can be performed by the animal organism, or portions of, it in a purely reflex way. Take a frog whose spinal cord is severed, and which therefore does not feel pain in the lower parts of its body, and cannot move them (if we may reason by analogy from the case of the man), and touch it with a drop of vinegar on one side below the point of injury. The foot on the same side will rise and rub the place: and if you hold the nearest foot down so that it cannot move, by and by the other foot will rise, cross the body, and begin to rub.1

Now if an action so apparently purposive and voluntary as this can be done in a way which we are compelled to believe is purely automatic, it is not out of the question to suppose that even more complex actions may be so performed, or indeed that all the movements of, say, a dog or a horse are nothing more than mechanical consequences of mechanical influences. We cannot in fact be sure that the dog or the horse even feels and knows what he is doing, still less that he wills and carries his will into action. Descartes' speculations led him to assert that beasts had no consciousness-that a horse does not feel the whip although it starts in him a definite set of actions, as his driver has learnt by experience. For the sake of the miserable creatures who pull your omnibuses in the Ginza, I could wish that Descartes were in the right. But then I know that I feel, and since the part of my body which I have learnt to regard as the organ of consciousness exists in a less developed condition in the horse, it is a more probable and also a much safer view to suppose that the horse does feel too. Granting that an animal feels, there is of course the other question, whether it also is capable of determining what it shall do, by free volition. For all we can tell, its actions may be like the winking of our eyes when a flash of light falls on them—a conscious but quite involuntary

1 Huxley. Nature, Vol. X, p. 364.

92

Impossibility of proving

[LECT.

act. And now we come to the practical aspect of the subject: how does all this bear on the actions of man? I know that I am conscious, but am I really free, or simply a conscious machine which goes by itself, the body keeping the mind informed of its movements, but performing these just as a machine would do, without any control or interference by the mind? Is my body speaking these words by itself, by motions which are the mere reflections in my organism of certain physical influences proceeding from outside, or the necessary results of certain physical states of the machine itself? Is this lecture as purely a mechanical product as the tune of a barrel-organ?

In support of this view it is urged that so many very complex movements have been proved to be reflex that mere complexity is no evidence of freedom. Some writers have even said that the idea of the will influencing matter is nonsense; that the only thing which influences matter is the position of surrounding matter or the motion of surrounding matter.1

On the other hand, it is asserted that our sense of freedom of action (in certain cases and within certain limits) is as strong and direct as any of our other facts of consciousness, and that since all science is built up from our recognition of the facts of consciousness, we should be in error if we were to deduce from one set of these facts a conclusion which flies in the face of another set. And it is also urged that we are ourselves conscious of a distinction between certain acts which are merely reflex and others which we feel to be deliberate.2

Between the two views I shall not presume to offer a decision. But if you say that the notion of will influencing matter is "nonsense," it seems to me that you make the mistake of carrying a conclusion derived from experience in one region into

1 Clifford. Lectures and Essays, Vol. II, p. 56.

2 Carpenter. Mental Physiology, Preface to the fourth edition.