For some years they had been trying to get rid of feeling, consciousness, and mind generally, from active participation in the evolution of the universe. They admitted, indeed, that feeling and consciousness attend the working of the world’s gear, as noise attends the working of a steam-engine, but they would not allow that consciousness produced more effect in the working of the world than noise on that of the steam-engine. Feeling and noise were alike accidental unessential adjuncts and nothing more. Incredible as it may seem to those who are happy enough not to know that this attempt is an old one, they were trying to reduce the world to the level of a piece of unerring though sentient mechanism. Men and animals must be allowed to feel and even to reflect; this much must be conceded, but granted that they do, still (so, at least, it was contended) it has no effect upon the result; it does not matter as far as this is concerned whether they feel and think or not; everything would go on exactly as it does and always has done, though neither man nor beast knew nor felt anything at all. It is only by maintaining things like this that people will get pensions out of the British public. Some such position as this is a _sine quâ non_ for the Neo-Darwinistic doctrine of natural selection, which, as Von Hartmann justly observes, involves an essentially mechanical mindless conception of the universe; to natural selection’s door, therefore, the blame of the whole movement in favour of mechanism must be justly laid. It was natural that those who had been foremost in preaching mindless designless luck as the main means of organic modification, should lend themselves with alacrity to the task of getting rid of thought and feeling from all share in the direction and governance of the world. Professor Huxley, as usual, was among the foremost in this good work, and whether influenced by Hobbes, or Descartes, or Mr. Spalding, or even by the machine chapters in “Erewhon” which were still recent, I do not know, led off with his article “On the hypothesis that animals are automata” (which it may be observed is 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.