not one of them is applied to anything mechanical. Let us consider the word _automatic_. The Greek ‘automatos’, which meant ‘self-moved’,[56] was Latinized in the form ‘automatus’ at about the beginning of our era, and _automatous_—now obsolete—is actually found in the works of the seventeenth-century writer, Sir Thomas Browne. This old adjective had the sense of “spontaneous”, “of one’s own free will”, and was used of the animal and vegetable worlds as opposed to the mineral, or of events which came about “by chance”; while in Plato’s philosophy the distinction between that which is “self-moved”, and that which can only be moved by something outside itself had been taken as the very antithesis between spirit and matter, between eternal and perishable. _Automatic_ is first found in English in the eighteenth century. The earliest quotation given by the _Oxford Dictionary_ is taken from David Hartley, who wrote in 1748: “The motions of the body are of two kinds, automatic and voluntary. The automatic motions are those which arise from the mechanism of the body in an evident manner. They are called automatic from their resemblance to the motions of automata, or machines, whose principle of motion is within themselves. Of this kind are the motions of the heart and peristaltic motion of the bowels.” In 1802 Paley pointed out “the difference between an animal and an automatic statue”, and sixty years later a writer on physics, after speaking of the amoeba as being “irritable and automatic”, added a note to the effect that— Automatic ... has recently acquired a meaning almost exactly opposite to that which it originally bore, and an automatic action is now by many understood to mean nothing more than an action produced by some machinery or other. In this work I use it in the older sense, as denoting an action of a body, the causes of which appear to lie in the body itself. The reason for this semantic _volte face_ may perhaps be detected in the history of the parallel word _automaton_. This had long ago (about 10 B.C.) been applied to the few primitive mechanical devices which Aryan civilization had then evolved, and its appearance in English seems to have preceded that of _automatic_ by nearly two centuries, as it is found in 1611 describing “a picture of a gentlewoman” made with eyes that open and shut. Then, later on in the same century, it began to be applied to clocks and watches, and there seems every reason to suppose that the presence of this particular kind of apparent “self-mover” on so many mantelpieces and in so many vest-pockets must have determined the peculiarly dead and mechanical meaning which _automatic_ now possesses.