Such being the intimate relation between nerve-action and mind-action, it has become the scientifically orthodox teaching that the two stand to one another in the relation of cause to effect. One of the most distinguished of my predecessors in this place, the President of the Royal Society, has said in one of the most celebrated of his lectures:--'We have as much reason for regarding the mode of motion of the nervous system as the cause of the state of consciousness, as we have for regarding any event as the cause of another.' And, by way of perfectly logical deduction from this statement, Professor Huxley argues that thought and feeling have nothing whatever to do with determining action: they are merely the bye-products of cerebration, or, as he expresses it, the indices of changes which are going on in the brain. Under this view we are all what he terms conscious automata, or machines which happen, as it were by chance, to be conscious of some of their own movements. But the consciousness is altogether adventitious, and bears the same ineffectual relation to the activity of the brain as a steam-whistle bears to the activity of a locomotive, or the striking of a clock to the time-keeping adjustments of the clock-work. Here, again, we meet with an echo of Hobbes, who opens his work on the Commonwealth with these words:-- 'Nature, the art whereby God hath made and governs the world, is by the _art_ of man, as in many other things, in this also imitated, that it can make an artificial animal. For seeing life is but a motion of limbs, the beginning whereof is in the principal part within; why may we not say, that all _automata_ (engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch), have an artificial life? For what is the _heart_, but a _spring_; and the _nerves_, but so many _strings_; and the _joints_, but so many _wheels_, giving motion to the whole body, such as was intended by the artificer[2]?'