Naturalism and Agnosticism, Vol. 2 (Classic Reprint)

A mong scientific men the primacy is usually given to the material side. Huxley taken as a type. He maintains that sensation is an effect of molecular change, but will not allow that molecular changes are ever the effect of volition. To justify this position volition has to be regarded as feeling or sensation simply. 29-33 LECTURE XII THE CONSCIOUS AUTOMATON THEORY Doctrine of Conscious Automatism or Psychical Epiphenomenalism examined. It is maintained (1) that there can be no causal connexion between the psychical and the physical series, and yet (2) that the psychical is a collateral product or epiphenomenon of the physical. The very statement is thus self-contradictory 35-38 Mind thus becomes impotent to control matter. In accepting this position Naturalism is really at variance with itself. For (1) it elsewhere assumes that mind is an efficient factor in biological evolution, and (2) the physicist proper declares that the laws of matter alone will not explain life. 38-40 However, taking the doctrine as it stands, there are these two articles specially to consider: (a) the primacy and independence of the automaton, and (6) the illusory character of psychical activity. The latter to be discussed first. 40-41 Huxley sendeavour to save himself from the charge of fatalism only results in substituting a blind necessity for a logical one. Again, he urges that we are free, inasmuch as in many respects we can do as we like. But how so, if volitions do not enter into the chain of causation of the action at all Turning now to the mechanical world, of which the automa ton is a part, we find no activity within that. 41-48 There is then activity nowhere! How then do we come to be talking of it even as illusory And if conscious automatism is true, how is illusion or error possible The ground on which Descartes called man a conscious automaton becaus